Contributors r 329Norman A. Stillman, PhD, is the Schusterman/Josey Professor of Judaic History
at the University of Oklahoma and an internationally recognized authority on
the history and culture of the Islamic world and on Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewry.
He is the author of seven books and numerous articles in several languages. He
was editor of the Association for Jewish Studies Review from 1989 to 1999, and he
is currently the executive editor of the Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World,
published both online and in print (Brill, 2010).
Mark S. Wagner is assistant professor of Arabic and director of the Arabic pro-
gram at Louisiana State University. He received his PhD from the Department
of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He works on pre-
modern Arabic literary and legal texts, particularly as they shed light on Muslim-
Jewish relations. His first book, Like Joseph in Beauty: Yemeni Vernacular Poetry
and Arab-Jewish Symbiosis (Brill, 2009), based primarily on his doctoral work,
analyzes the history and poetics of “Humayni” poetry, a semivernacular genre
from Yemen that was shared by Muslims and Jews. He is currently working on a
book on Jews who interacted with, and sometimes confronted, the Islamic courts
in Yemen in the first half of the twentieth century. This book will engage in de-
bates surrounding the status of non-Muslims in Islamic law.
Brannon Wheeler, PhD, is the founding director of the Center for Middle East
and Islamic Studies and professor of history at the U.S. Naval Academy in An-
napolis. He received his PhD in Near Eastern languages and civilizations from the
University of Chicago in 1993 and has been a visiting scholar at the Oxford Centre
for Islamic Studies, the College of Shariah and Islamic Studies at Kuwait Univer-
sity, and the Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Ber-
gen in Norway. Wheeler was the senior Fulbright fellow at the Royal Institute for
Inter-Faith Studies in Jordan, al-Azhar University in Egypt, and the Ministry of
Awqaf and Religious Affairs in Oman. He was the senior fellow at the American
Centers for Oriental Research in Jordan, a fellow at the Institute for Ismaili Stud-
ies in London, a research fellow at the American Institute of Maghreb Studies in
Tunisia, and the senior Islamicist-in-residence at the American Research Center
in Egypt. He has written and edited seven books including his most recent, Mecca
and Eden: Ritual, Relics, and Territory in Islam (University of Chicago, 2006). He
is the editor of the book series and journal of Comparative Islamic Studies, and has
been the guest editor of Islamic Law and Society and al-Tasamoh.