The Center for Cultural Analysis Race in Pre-Modern World Working Group, Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, and the Center for European Studies present:
Borderland Anxieties: The Politics of Genealogy in Late Medieval Granada
A lecture by Mohamad Ballan, Stony Brook University in New York.
Nov.12, 12-1:30pm in Academic Building West Seminar Room 6051
15 Seminary Place New Brunswick
Lunch will be served.
Please register here: https://tinyurl.com/2s3ukx9t
This lecture offers a new interpretation of the centrality of genealogical notions of “Arabness” (ʿurūbiyyah) in the writings of political and intellectual elites in the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada (1232-1492), the last surviving Muslim polity in medieval Iberia. The construction of a local identity is examined in light of the political and social reality of Nasrid Granada’s existence as a borderland polity entrenched in the farthest reaches of the Islamic world, between Latin Christendom and Islamic North Africa. The talk will demonstrate how this genealogical notion of “Arabness,” which fused together notions of Arab identity and the Islamic faith, constituted an elite discourse of power that sought to legitimize the authority, status, and territorial claims of the scholarly, military and political elites in the Nasrid kingdom.
Mohamad Ballan is currently an Assistant Professor of History at Stony Brook University in New York. His research is focused on the intellectual, cultural and political history of late medieval and early modern Mediterranean. He received his PhD from the Department of History at the University of Chicago in 2019, and has previously held appointments as a Junior Fellow at the Dartmouth Society of Fellows (2018–2019) and as a Mellon Faculty Fellow at the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame (2021–2022). In both his writing and his teaching, Ballan highlights the interconnected histories of Europe, Africa and Asia through a close examination of social, intellectual and political networks. His first book, titled The Politics of Sovereignty in the Medieval Islamic West: The World of Lisan al-Din ibn al-Khatib (forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2026), explores the dynamic intellectual and political culture of Islamic Spain and North Africa during the late Middle Ages. His second book project, tentatively titled Mediterranean Entanglements: Migration, Conversion and the Making of Race in the Ibero-African Borderlands, 1300-1600, provides a nuanced exploration of borderlands, conversion and migration by examining lineage as a meaningful and important category in structuring the process of racialization.