Spanning the Strait: Studies in Unity in the Western Mediterranean

Spanning the Strait: Studies in Unity in the Western Mediterranean brings together a multidisciplinary collection of essays that examines the deep connections that bound together the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghrib in the medieval and early modern periods. Six articles on topics ranging from the eighth-century slave trade to sixteenth-century apocalypticism trace and analyze movement, mutual influence and patterns shared in the face of political, religious, and cultural difference.
By transcending traditional disciplinary and temporal divisions, this collection of essays highlights the long history of contact and exchange that united the two sides of the Strait of Gibraltar. A comprehensive introduction by the editors contextualizes the articles within the last half-century of scholarship and salient contemporary trends.
Contributors are Adam Gaiser, Linda G. Jones, Hussein Fancy, S.J. Pearce, David Coleman, and Marya T. Green-Mercado.

Yuen-Gen Liang, Ph.D. (2005) Princeton University, is Associate Professor of History at Wheaton College (Massachusetts). He is author of Family and Empire: The Fernández de Córdoba and the Spanish Realm (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). He is Founder and Executive Director of the Spain-North Africa Project.
Abigail Krasner Balbale, Ph.D. (2012) Harvard University, is the Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Material Culture at Bard Graduate Center in New York. She focuses on the cultural history of the medieval western Mediterranean, and is working on a manuscript about the intersections of religion, political power and cultural production in twelfth-century Iberia and the Maghrib.
Andrew Devereux, Ph.D. (2011) Johns Hopkins University, is an assistant professor of History at Loyola Marymount University. He published “North Africa in Early Modern Spanish Political Thought,” (JSCS, v.12 no. 3 (Sept. 2011): 275-291).
Camilo Gómez-Rivas, Ph.D. (2009) Yale University, is an assistant professor of history at the American University in Cairo. His most recent article is "The Ransom Industry and the Expectation of Refuge on the Western Mediterranean Muslim-Christian Frontier, 1085-1350," (Oxford, 2013).