Announcement | Gevork M. Avedissian Chair in Armenian History and Civilization

We are delighted to announce that Alison M. Vacca will join Columbia University as the

Gevork M. Avedissian Chair in Armenian History and Civilization.

Congratulations and welcome, Dr. Vacca!

Dr. Vacca is a historian of early Islam focusing on the caliphal provinces of Armenia and Caucasian Albania in the Umayyad and early ʿAbbasid periods. Her work relies on Arabic and Armenian sources to investigate intercultural transmission, intercommunal violence, and gender. Her first book was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017 and received the 2018 prize from the Central Eurasian Studies Society. It explores how the memory of the Sasanians informed descriptions of caliphal administration and administrative geography in the North. She has also recently completed a collaborative project for an edition, translation, and commentary of Łewond’s eighth-century history of the Caliphate. She is currently working on accounts of the Khazar frontier for what they reveal about masculinity, matriliny, and marriages in the medieval Near East. In addition to her research, Dr. Vacca also serves as the editor of Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the medieval Middle East.