Notes on Contributors
David Abulafia is Professor of Mediterranean History in the University of Cambridge,
a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His
numerous books include The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
(London and New York: Allen Lane and Oxford University Press, 2011), and The
Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2008).
Fred Astren (PhD Berkeley) is Professor of Jewish Studies and a member of the
Faculty in Middle East and Islamic Studies at San Francisco State University. He has
published Karaite Judaism and Historical Understanding (Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 2004), and works on early medieval Jewish history in the
Mediterranean and in the orbit of Islam.
Clifford R. Backman has taught at Boston University since 1989. He has published
three books: The Decline and Fall of Medieval Sicily (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), The Worlds of Medieval Europe (2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009), and The Cultures of the West (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013). He is currently at work on a study of the idea of tolerance in medieval
Christianity, Islam and Judaism.
Naor Ben-Yehoyada is Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at Gonville and
Caius College, University of Cambridge. He specializes in Mediterranean maritime,
political, and historical anthropology, specifically the maritime aspect of Israeli-
Palestinian history and post-World War Two region formation processes between
Sicily and Tunisia.
John Bintliff is Professor of Classical and Mediterranean Archaeology at Leiden
University, the Netherlands, and Professorial Fellow, Edinburgh University. He
studied Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University, where he also com-
pleted his PhD in 1977 on the (pre)history of human settlement in Greece. He was
Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at Bradford University, where he taught from 1977,
then moved to Durham University as Reader in Archaeology in 1990, where he
taught until moving to Leiden in 1999. In 1988 he was elected a Fellow of the Society
of Antiquaries. Since 1978 he has been co-directing (with Cambridge University) the