معرفی
Joel Blecher is an Associate Professor of History at The George Washington University and held the Bayard Dodge Distinguished Visiting Professorship at the American University in Cairo (2023–24). His expertise spans Islamic history, medieval economic systems, and religious thought, with a focus on understudied sources across Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey, India, and European/North American manuscript libraries. His research bridges history and religious studies, addressing long-term transformations in Islamic thought.
Education includes a PhD (2013) and MA (2010) from Princeton University, and a BA from Swarthmore College (2004). He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and ACLS, and fellowships at the Library of Congress Kluge Center, Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
His research explores how religious frameworks shaped commercial ethics in pre-modern trade networks, as seen in his upcoming book Profit & Prophecy: Islam and the Spice Trade. Major publications include Said the Prophet of God: Hadith Commentary across a Millennium (2018) and co-edited volumes on hadith studies. His work also engages public discourse through radio, podcasts, and Penguin Classics translations like Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani’s Merits of the Plague (2023).
