xii notes on contributors
valerie Ramseyer is Associate Professor of History at Wellesley College. Her
main field of research is the history of southern Italy and Sicily in the early and
central Middle Ages. In 2006 she published a book with Cornell University Press
entitled The Transformation of a Religious Landscape: Medieval Southern Italy,
850–1150.
Youval Rotman is senior lecturer in history at Tel Aviv University and is a social his-
torian of the Eastern Mediterranean world of the first millennium. His research
ascribes a central role to the social and cultural processes in this region under Roman
and Byzantine rule. In this framework he has worked on slavery, captives and redeem-
ing of captives, child labor, religious conversion, and social models of sanctity. He is
the author of Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2009).
Teofilo F. Ruiz is a Distinguished Professor of History and Spanish and Portuguese
at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was awarded the National Humanities
Medal by President Obama in 2012 and elected to the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences in 2013. His two most recent books are The Terror of History: On the
Uncertainties of Life in Western Civilization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2011) and A King Travels: Festive Traditions in Late Medieval and Early
Modern Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
Paola Sacchi is Assistant Professor of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Anthropology
at the University of Turin, Italy. She has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in the
Negev Desert and her research centers on gender, kinship and family, honor, ethnicity
and migration, in Israel, Italy, and more generally in the Mediterranean.
Robert Sallares studied classics and ancient history at Cambridge University and
moved into biomolecular archaeology and medical history at the University of
Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. He is the author of Malaria and
Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and The Ecology of the Ancient Greek
World (London: Duckworth, 1991) as well as numerous articles.
Emilie Savage-Smith recently retired as Professor of the History of Islamic Science
at the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, and is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Her most recent publications include (with co-author Yossef Rapoport) An Eleventh-
Century Egyptian Guide to the Universe: The “Book of Curiosities”, edited with an anno-
tated translation (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
Paolo Squatriti teaches history and Romance languages and literatures at the
University of Michigan. He studies medieval European environments. His book on
chestnut woodlands, Landscape and Change in Early Medieval Italy, published by
Cambridge University Press, appeared in 2013.
Dominique valérian is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Lyon 2
and a member of the Centre Interuniversitaire d’Histoire et d’Archéologie Médiévale.
He published Bougie, port maghrébin, 1067–1510 (Rome: École française de Rome,
2006) and co-edited Espaces et réseaux en Méditerranée médiévale, 2 vols. (Paris: