I specialize in the history of the later Roman world and the early Islamic umma or “community.” My work addresses such issues as the advent of militant and aggressive interpretations of Christianity and Islam, the role of violence in processes of communal self-fashioning and the place of narrative and memory in the constitution of communal and individual identities. One particular focus of my work is a reconstruction of the processes by which members of self-consciously distinct and discreet confessional communities drew upon a common lexicon of narratives, literary tropes and other cultural forms as resources for locating themselves within the complex social, political and religious networks of the late ancient Mediterranean and Middle East.

My recent research has focused upon the processes by which the early
Muslim community became aware of itself as an imperial entity, and resources and strategies employed by early Muslim historians, religious scholars, geographers and biographers as they imagined and narrated the formative events, institutions and personalities of Islam. As part of this project, I have examined the roles played in these processes by such entities as the Roman and Persian empires and their rulers, Christian and Jewish communal heroes and the material remains of the Middle East’s imperial and biblical pasts.

My other research interests include late ancient Christian and Muslim ascetic theory and praxis, comparative hagiography, the erotics of domination and submission in Abbasid imperial literatures, borderlands theory, monster theory, Roman imperial projects of memorialization and commemoration, and, most recently, the problem of “authorship” with regard to early Muslim and Rabbinic texts, and the implications of this problem for our understanding of Rabbinic and early Islamic hermeneutics.