Cogut Institute for the Humanities
Center for the Study of the Early Modern World
Elias Muhanna
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Associate Professor of History
Research Interests
Encyclopedism, Book Culture, Intellectual History, Vernaculars, Islamic World, Classical Arabic
Biography
Elias Muhanna is an associate professor of Comparative Literature and History at Brown University. His research focuses on the history of encyclopedic texts in the Islamic world and Europe, the cultural production of the Mamluk Empire, and the problem of the vernacular in different literary traditions. He is the author of The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2018), as well as two translations: The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition (Penguin Classics, 2016) and The Book of Travels (NYU Press).
In addition to his academic work, Muhanna writes regularly for The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The New York Times, The Nation, and other periodicals.