Department of History

Elias Muhanna, Associate Professor Comparative Literature and History, is a scholar of the medieval and early modern Islamicate world with interests in intellectual history, encyclopedism, and the history of languages.

His publications include The World in a Book: al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2018); a translation and edition of Hanna Diyab’s 18^th-century memoir, The Book of Travels (NYU Press, 2021); a selected translation of Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri's 14th-century Arabic compendium, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition (Penguin Classics, 2016); and an edited volume, The Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies (DeGruyter, 2016). He is currently at work on a cultural history of the Arabic language.