Biography
Biography
My specializations is Middle East (Medieval). My Research and Teaching Interests include Social and cultural history of the medieval Middle East: comparative history; comparative family history. Teaching fields: the Middle East from antiquity to the twentieth century; Muslim responses to the Crusades; Middle Eastern cities from Late Antiquity to the twentieth-century; nineteenth-century Islamic political movements; nineteenth-century Egypt and Syria.
Education
Ph.D., UC-Berkeley
M.A., Pontificio Instituto di Studi Arabi e d’Isalamistica
B.A., UC-Berkeley
Books
Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190–1350
Michael Chamberlain. Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190–1350. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Michael Chamberlain focuses on medieval Damascus to develop a new approach to the relationship between the society and culture of the Middle East. The author argues that historians have long imposed European strictures onto societies to which they were alien. Western concepts of legitimate order were inappropriate to medieval Muslim society where social advancement was dependent upon the production of knowledge and religious patronage, and it was the household, rather than the state agency or corporation, that held political and social power. A parallel is drawn between the learned elite and the warriors of Damascus who, through similar strategies, acquired status and power and passed them on in their households. By examining material from the Latin West, Sung China and the Sinicized empires of Inner Asia, the author addresses the nature of political power in the period.
History Courses Taught
- History 205 – The Making of the Islamic World: The Middle East, 500-1500 – Syllabus 2015 (pdf)
- History 225 – The First Islamic Empire – Syllabus 2015 (pdf)
- History 439 – Islamic History From the Origin of Islam to the Ottoman Empire – Syllabus 2017 (pdf)
- History 851 – Seminar on Ottoman and Middle East History
- History 858 – Seminar in Problems of Islamic History – Topics: “Medieval Islamic Social History”