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Abigail Krasner Balbale

Abigail K. Balbale is an assistant professor at New York University in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. Her research focuses on the intersection of political power, religious ideology and visual and material culture in the medieval Islamic world. She is particularly interested in how rulers legitimated their power through cultural production, holy war, and diplomacy. Her current book project, tentatively entitled “Wolf King of Glorious Memory: Affiliation, Accommodation and Resistance in Ibn Mardanīsh’s al-Andalus,” centers on an enigmatic twelfth-century ruler who fought the Marrakech-based Almohad dynasty through alliance with his Christian neighbors and asserted his authority with reference to the Abbasid caliphate in the east. Generally, the book explores how Muslim rulers in the Western Mediterranean adapted and transformed ideologies and material symbols of power from the broader Islamic world in order to assert their authority. She uses sources including chronicles, poetry and chancery documents, as well as coins, architecture, and portable objects, that reveal both the interconnectedness of the Islamic world and the intimacy between the Christians and Muslims who competed for territory in the Western Mediterranean. Her earlier includes The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture (Yale University Press, 2008), co-authored with art historian Jerrilynn Dodds and the late literary historian María Rosa Menocal. She co-edited the book Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts (Harvard University Press / Program in Islamic Law, 2017), with legal historian Intisar Rabb.  She previously served on the faculty of the Bard Graduate Center, taught at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and served as Secretary of the Historians of Islamic Art Association (2014-2017).

Her research has been supported by grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation and the Medieval Academy of America. She received an undergraduate degree in Arabic and Islamic Studies and Humanities from Yale University and earned a PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University.