Mohamad Ballan

Mohamad Ballan is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Stony Brook University. He is an historian of the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean world. In both his writing and his teaching, Ballan highlights the interconnected histories of Europe, Africa and Asia through a close examination of social, intellectual and political networks. In his first manuscript, Lord of the Pen and Sword: Sovereignty and History in the Islamic West (forthcoming), Ballan explores the phenomenon of the “scholar-statesman” – figures who ascended to the highest offices of state – through the life and works of Lisan al-Din ibn al-Khatib (1313–1374), the most prominent Spanish Muslim historian, chancellor and philosopher of the 14th century. Ballan describes an intellectual, cultural, and social network of the late medieval Western Mediterranean in which “scholar-statesmen” like Ibn al-Khatib were instrumental in reshaping the political landscape of the region. Mohamad was educated at the University of British Columbia (B.A., 2008) and the University of Chicago (Ph.D., 2019), and has previously held appointments as a Junior Fellow at the Dartmouth Society of Fellows (2018–2019) and as a Mellon Faculty Fellow at the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame (2021–2022). He also maintains a popular scholarly blog: https://ballandalus.wordpress.com.