Snowden, Emma
Specialties:
Medieval Mediterranean, Iberia and North Africa, Muslim-Christian relations, identity and memory, gender and sexuality.
Emma Snowden
Assistant Professor | Medieval History
I am a historian of the medieval Mediterranean, focusing in particular on Iberia and North Africa. I’m most interested in how people from different religious, linguistic, and ethnocultural backgrounds interacted with one another and how this influenced the ways they wrote about their shared histories.
Currently, I’m at work on my first monograph, Narrating Conquest and Colonization in the Medieval Western Mediterranean. This book project draws on Arabic, Latin, and Romance chronicles from the 8th through the 14th centuries to examine how Muslims and Christians narrated political and religious conflict, exploring the extent to which writers across the Strait of Gibraltar viewed their history as a shared one and wrote within a common historical framework. My research has been supported by generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Historical Association, the Medieval Academy of America, and the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, among others.
My course offerings focus on premodern Islamic history, as well as exploring my interests in interfaith relations, gender and sexuality, long-distance travel, and connectivity between North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe in the Middle Ages.
Research Interests
Medieval Mediterranean, Iberia and North Africa, Muslim-Christian relations, identity and memory, gender and sexuality
Selected Publications
“Women as Frontier-Makers in the Llibre dels fets of James I of Aragon,” Gender & History [forthcoming; currently available through Early View]
“Islam as the Source of All Wonders: Arab and Islamic Identity in al-Saraqusṭī’s Maqāmāt al-luzūmiyya,” La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures 47, no. 2 (Spring 2019): 9–31
Education
Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 2021
M.A., University of Minnesota, 2017
B.A., Wichita State University, 2013