Cecilia Palombo

I am a historian of the premodern Middle East specializing in late antiquity and the early Islamic period. I study its documentary cultures, multilingual traditions, and endangered cultural heritages. I gained my PhD from Princeton University in 2020. My dissertation discussed various ways in which Christian religious officials and monastic organizations contributed to building strategies of local government in Umayyad and Abbasid Egypt, looking at local contexts, primarily based on Arabic and Coptic papyri. Previously, I had studied classics and earned degrees in historical and religious studies, archival studies, and Islamic history. Before joining NELC, I worked as a postdoc at the Institute for Area Studies of Leiden University, in the ERC-project “Embedding Conquest: Naturalizing Muslim Rule in the Early Islamic Empire.” I also collaborated at the ERC-project “the Qur’an as a Source for Late Antiquity,” based at Tübingen University. Between 2015 and 2022, I was a member of the academic Programming Committee of the International Quranic Studies Association.  

In my research I explore questions about administrative, scribal, and archival practices involving different religious and linguistic groups in early Islamicate societies, including the documents’ modern musealization and digitization. I am interested in the concept of ‘community’ and in interrogating community-centered historical narratives about the premodern Middle East. My focus has been on documentary and archaeological heritages of southern Europe, the Mashriq, Egypt, and Turkey. I am at home in Rome and in Istanbul. Both in research and in teaching, I often put the emphasis on methodological questions and challenges, such as those connected to the materiality of written sources from the early Islamic period. I have published studies concerning Arabic, Coptic, and Greek papyri, and Christian Arabic and Coptic literary texts. My publications include a critical discussion of the study of trade in the early Islamic period, and a study of late-antique and Quranic formulaicity which interacts with digital scholarship through text reuse detection methods. My current book-project interlaces a study of local communities and localized ruling practices in the early Islamic period with historiographical questions arising from the dispersal of documentary heritages. 

"Lives of Patriarchs, Lives of Qadis: Reading the Abbasid sources of the 'History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria' as Islamicate texts." Journal of Islamicate Intellectual History (Advanced Article: 2023), 1–29. 

Ties of Kinship and the Early Islamic Empire: Special issue of Medieval Encounters vol. 29 issue 5-6 (2023). Co-edited by Cecilia Palombo and Birte Kristiansen.

“The Local Clergy and ‘Ties of Indebtedness’ in Abbasid Egypt: Some Reflections on Studying Debt and Credit in the Early Islamic Middle East.” In Ties that Bind: Mechanisms and Structures of Social Dependency in the Early Islamic Empire. Edited by Edmund Hayes and Petra Sijpesteijn (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

“Archives of local governance, monastic libraries, dispersed archives.” Bulletin d'études orientales vol. 69. Special Issue: Faire archive au Proche-Orient hier et aujourd’hui: légitimités, matérialités, temporalités (forthcoming).

With Eline Scheerlinck. “Asking for a Friend: Travel requests and social relationships in Umayyad Egypt.” In How to Ask: Strategies of Entreating in Medieval Eurasia. Special issue of The Medieval Globe. Edited by Petra Sijpesteijn (forthcoming).

"Studying Trade and Local Economies in Early Islamicate Societies." Cromohs - Cyber Review of Modern Historiography 24 (2022), 161–181.

With Donna Yates. "Digital Transit Ports for the Illicit Trade in Antiquities: The Case of the 'Afghan Genizah'." Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (Advanced Article: 2022; Printed version: no. 38/1 (2023), 257–276).