Kristina Richardson (University of Virginia), Breaking New Ground: East African People and Plants in the Early Islamic Middle East
Abstract: In this talk I take inspiration from the botanical turn in medieval European historiography to propose a new perspective on early Islamic history. Hundreds of thousands of East African laborers were mobilized in the first centuries of Islam to transform desert landscapes into cultivated fields and pleasure gardens. By recentering their rural, agrarian labor, we see that these East Africans were essential counterparts of people living in far-removed cities. A balanced portrait of this early period emerges.
About the speaker: Kristina Richardson is John L. Nau III Professor of History and Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. She specializes in histories of non-elite groups in the Middle East. She is the author of two monographs: Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World (2012) and Roma in the Medieval Islamic World: Literacy, Culture, and Migration (2022). The latter was awarded the Dan David Prize, the Monica H. Green Prize for Distinguished Medieval Research from the Medieval Academy of America, and Honorable Mention for the Middle East Medievalists Book Prize. She also co-edited (with Boris Liebrenz) The Notebook of Kamāl al-Dīn the Weaver in 2021. She currently is writing a book on free and unfree South Asian and East African agricultural laborers in early Islamic Iraq.