Joel Blecher

When the sun enters its final death throes, it will first expand into a red giant, swallowing up Greenland, before collapsing into a white dwarf

I’m thrilled to announce that my book, provisionally titled “Sea of Treasures: A Cultural History of Ancient Indian Ocean Trade” is now under contract with @princetonupress.bsky.social. Excited for it to be out in the world in 2026!

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not surprised but still speechless

my voice would be horse after reciting this

A fascinating history of the world told through the prism of the evolution, domestication, and migration of the horse!

Wanted the chapters on the Islamic world to have a bit more horse poetry…

can we please collect some here? Is Imru’ al-Qays on blusky yet?!

I’m amazed

Map of New England, with 5 dots in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Maine. These indicate colonial era sites where late 17th C Yemeni coins have been found.

My new article: "Linking Seventeenth-Century Yemen to Colonial New England: A Closer Look at Silver Coins across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans" in Am Journal of Numismatics (2024).

Tracing the journey of silver coins from Yemen to Madagascar to colonial America, many found by metal detectorists.

Wine, coffee, hashish, opium, tobacco, qat… Teaching a class on „Islam, Drugs, and Empire“ this semester… soliciting any and all suggestions for recent scholarship to read….

Studis wenn ich frage wie es mit ChatGPT bei Hausarbeiten aussieht

Carrie Underwood? Wake me up when it’s Carrie Brownstein

manuscript showing a sectional map from al-Idrisi. It is worn in the middle with some water damage near the top. The map has a gold border with notes in Arabic in red and black ink around the margins. Within the border are two bodies of water in blue with light blue waves. Rivers cross the land in lines of blue. Land is not colored except mountains, in green, burnt orange, pink, & red. Arabic text in red identifies seas and regions; cities are noted in black. The map shows the south and east of France from Toulouse (top right) to Burgundy (bottom right), separated by the Alps from northern and central Italy, located between the Mediterranean (top) and Adriatic (bottom) Seas.

New article alert!

Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddima offers the most extended reading of a series of maps known from medieval literature. In this article, Alfred Hiatt parses Ibn Khaldūn’s text alongside manuscripts of al-Idrīsī’s 12th-cent. geography, prompting questions about Ibn Khaldūn’s art of history

I find AI images eerily transfixing, which is why they generally make poor clip art (aside from the labor and IP issues). Always frozen „beautiful“ smiling faces optimized to claw the readers‘ attention. Human artists know the ethics of illustrating oblige one to support the text—not steal the show

This article features an AI-generated image that, in my view, works against the call for "fair media representation." Images of real people in real life contexts, photographed by working photographers, would do more to help us navigate the current political landscape than AI fantasies.

@alialtafmian.bsky.social @ramonharvey.bsky.social

Hadith Commentary Hadith Commentary

Paperback!

Hadith Commentary: Continuity and Change, is now available to pre-order in paperback!

edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-hadith-...

30% off when ordering direct from EUP — code is PAPER30.

dog heaven is probably a january snowstorm in the woods near sligo creek

My colleague Islam Dayeh at Ghent shared this one with me jobs.ugent.be/job/Ghent-Pr...

50th anniversary this month!

Imagine being in Köln in January of 1975 and completely missing it

Also a sensible choice

Check this out in this December’s Past & Present! @pastpresentsoc.bsky.social

Now we’re cooking

Can’t wait to read this

this makes perfect sense

islamicstudiessky and #islamichistory -sky can we get a good list of scholarship on fragrance in the last couple decades?! those most pleasant and most revolting are acceptable

In the early 2010s I recall talal asad give a lecture in which he pointed out that olfaction was one of the least studied areas in the anthropology of Islam

olfactory ethics was kind of a big deal during plague times… foul smelling air being the supposed source of mass death and all…

The Caliphal Finances project is inviting authors to contribute to their Handbook of Fiscal History in the Early Islamic World (7th-10th century)! Abstracts due 15 January 2025. See the linked post for more details.
blogs.ed.ac.uk/caliphalfina...

In our latest translation, "די מאַלינע" or "The Hideaway", translated by Jake Schneider, is an excerpt from Avrom Nokhem Stencl’s memoirs of urban wandering in Weimar Berlin.

https://buff.ly/3UMgqyf