School of Historical Studies

This public talk will be centered on John Cassidy's 2025 book, Capitalism and Its Critics, which provides a helpful framework for periods of economic disruption—like the one that AI seems likely to usher in.

John Cassidy has been a staff writer at Th...

The emergence of mechanized Chinese writing in the nineteenth century and digital Chinese writing in the twentieth posed profound practical and conceptual challenges to a writing system whose history spans millennia. The dynamism, reach, and...

The India Book Project is a landmark scholarly initiative dedicated to publishing the final three volumes of S. D. Goitein's monumental work on Judeo-Arabic documents from the Cairo Geniza. These documents illuminate the vibrant world of Jewish...

European Aramaicists regarded the second half of the nineteenth century, up to about the First World War, as a particularly fruitful period—indeed, the beginning of scientific Syriac studies. They themselves attributed this explosion of research to...

This term’s S. T. Lee Lecture of the School of Historical Studies, organized by Professor Angelos Chaniotis, is dedicated to the subject of cultural heritage. The lecture will be delivered by Professor Hermann Parzinger, President of the Stiftung...

More languages and literary traditions existed simultaneously in the medieval Middle East than any individual scholar can hope to master.  Disciplinary norms have mandated that scholars focus on one or perhaps two languages, but the actual...

ARSHEEF is a collaborative project and a website that makes available up-to-date guides to libraries and archives across North Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and South Asia, as well as digital options for those who cannot travel. 

Run by...

Will future large-scale water resources plans make compelling arguments for including the reduction of the loss of biodiversity across scales in fluvial landscapes? Is the structure of river networks a template for the large-scale spread of...

How did dogs become scientific beings? Although it is now widely understood that a Border Collie or a Golden Retriever is a cognitively complex creature meriting advanced nutrition and monthly pharmaceuticals, this way of thinking about dogs was the...

The lecture introduces the audience to the process of interaction of one of the most important Middle Eastern Church traditions, Syriac Christianity, with the Holy City and the Holy Land. Even if scholars have often argued that the late antique...