Contact
Secondary Phone: +32-92643555
Fax: +32-92644271
Department of Languages & Cultures
University of Ghent
Blandijnberg 2
Gent
B-9000
Belgium
ABOUT
Jo Van Steenbergen (PhD KULeuven [Belgium], 2003) is research professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Ghent University (Belgium).
He engages with the social and cultural history of the pre-modern Islamic world, with a particular focus on the Islamic middle period (ca. 1000-1500), on Egypt and Syria, on the practices, discourses and structures of power elites in the sultanate of Cairo (ca. 1200-1517), and on the de/construction of grand narratives in Mamluk/Islamic history.
He was a research fellow of the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC, 1997-8, 2003), a research assistant at KULeuven (Belgium) and the Flemish Science Foundation (FWO) (1998-2003), a lecturer at the University of St Andrews (2004-7), a senior research fellow at the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg: History and Society during the Mamluk Era (1250-1517) (Bonn, 2014-15), and a visiting lecturer/professor at the British Museum and at the School of Oriental and African Studies (London) (2006-13), at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Paris) (2008), and at the National University of Malaysia (2009).
Jo Van Steenbergen has been the recipient of a European Research Council Starting Grant (2009-14) and of a European Research Council Consolidator Grant (2016-21), for research projects on the political history of 15th-century Egypt and Syria (‘The Mamlukisation of the Mamluk Sultanate’). Jo Van Steenbergen was general editor of al-Masāq: the Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean (Routledge/Society for the Medieval Mediterranean) (2011-16). He is a member of the programming committee of the IMC (Leeds, UK), editor (with K. Goudie) of Critical Approaches to Arabic Historiography (EUP) and editorial board member of Mamluk Studies (Bonn UP/ASK), The Medieval Mediterranean (Brill) and Annales Islamologiques (IFAO).
Discipline
History
Sub Areas
13th-18th Centuries
Historiography
State Formation
Cultural Studies
Mamluk Studies
Mediterranean Studies
Turkish Studies
World History
Urban Studies
Geographic Areas of Interest
All Middle East
Egypt
Syria
Anatolia
Central Asia
Fertile Crescent
Islamic World
Iran
Iraq
Mashreq
Ottoman Empire
The Levant
Uzbekistan
Specialties
Islamic History (pre-modern)
Mamluk History And Culture
Arabic Historiography
Languages
Arabic (intermediate)
Dutch (native)
French (intermediate)
German (elementary)
English (advanced)
Education
PhD
| 2003
| Or Stds
| Katholieke U Leuven, Belgium
Abstracts
The Flux and Reflux of Mamluk State Formation. Reconsidering Mamluk Notions of Elite, State and Empire.
Narrative strategies, state-formation, and world-making in late medieval Egyptian chronicles
