About Luke

Luke Yarbrough, since 2013 an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Saint Louis University, earned his PhD in 2012 in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. In the fall of that year, he was a fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

His research is concerned with the history of the premodern Middle East and North Africa, especially inter-communal relations; law and other prescriptive discourses; Arabic historiography; the oral transmission of knowledge; and comparative history. Recently his edition-translation of a thirteenth-century polemic from Egypt was published in NYU Press's Library of Arabic Literature, as The Sword of Ambition: Bureaucratic Rivalry in Medieval Egypt.

As a Junior Research Fellow at NYUAD in 2016-17, he will complete a book about how premodern Muslim writers responded when Muslim rulers hired non-Muslim state officials. He will also study two unpublished texts from medieval Egypt, by a Muslim and a Jewish author, on law and tax administration, respectively; write articles about such things as the transmission of the infamous "Pact of 'Umar," a pilfered chronicle by Saladin's nephew, and non-Muslims in the literary works of a Cordoban qadi; and lay groundwork for a book on the Ayyubid period in Egypt (ca. 1171-1250).