Dr. Antonia Bosanquet is assistant professor at the Department of Ancient History and Classical Civilization. She is a historian of the Middle East and the Islamic Mediterranean and her current research focuses on the Islamication of the Maghrib in the 8th and 9th century. She examines the relevance of migration and knowledge networks, economic development and sectarian Islam to the integration of what is now Tunisia, Algeria and western Libya into the Islamic Empire. She co-organized several international conferences on the Islamic West between 2020 and 2023 and co-edited The Umayyads from West to East: New Perspectives (2023) and Continuing Tradition? Sacralization Practices in the Early Islamicate West and the Influence of Late Antiquity (2023). She is particularly interested in legal texts from the early Islamic West and their relevance for understanding social change. 

Dr. Bosanquet’s earlier work focused on the regulation of Jews and Christians living under Muslim rule from the 7th to the 14th century. Her second book, Minding their Place: Space and Religious Hierarchy in Ibn al-Qayyim’s Ahkam ahl al-dhimma, analyzed a key text in the legal discourse about non-Muslim subjects, written in Damascus in the 14th century. Her first book, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle is the Hand that Rules the World: An Analysis of Muhammad Qutb’s Portrayal of Feminism as a Jewish Conspiracy studied the modern Islamist author Muhammad Qutb’s (d. 2014) view of Judaism and gender relations.

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