Professor Andrew Marsham

About

Professor Andrew Marsham, BA, MPhil, DPhil (Oxon). Director of Studies in Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, College Lecturer in Arabic Studies.

College

I supervise students in Middle Eastern Studies and am the Director of Studies for Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. I have recently served on the college Bursarial Committee and as a Postgraduate College Tutor.

Research

The early Islamic period (c.600–c.1000 CE) was a pivotal era in world history, when new religious and political formations emerged across Eurasia and North Africa. My current research work concerns the formation of a written historical tradition in Arabic during this period and the environmental history of the early Islamic empires. I am also interested in early Islamic political culture, and comparative and trans-regional historical studies of ancient and medieval North Africa and Eurasia. My new monograph, The Umayyad Empire (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), surveys the history of the earliest Islamic empire, situating it in these wider historical contexts.

Department

I am Professor of Classical Arabic Studies at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. I teach at all levels of the undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes and supervise dissertations at undergraduate, MPhil and PhD levels. In the Faculty, I am currently Director of Postgraduate Studies and Secretary of the Degree Committee.

Recent and selected publications

• The Umayyad Empire. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (2024).
• Wealth and the Image of the Umayyads in the Sermons Attributed to Abū Hamza (d. 748). In Hannah-Lena Hagemann (ed.) & Alasdair Grant (ed.) (ed.) Between Rebels and Rulers in the Early Islamicate World: Power, Contention and Identity (2024) pp. 265–89 (2024).
• Kinship, Dynasty, and the Umayyads. In Maaike van Berkel (ed.) & Letizia Osti (ed.) The Historian of Islam at Work: Essays in Honour of Hugh N. Kennedy pp. 12-45 (2022).
• Bede, Ibn Isḥāq, and the idols: narratives of conversion at late antique edges. In Phil Booth and Mary Whitby (ed.) Mélanges James Howard-Johnston. Travaux et Mémoires 26. pp. 315-339 (2022).
• The Umayyad World. Ed. Routledge (2021).
• The Caliphate. In Peter Fibiger Bang (ed.) & Walter Scheidel (ed.) The Oxford History of World Empire. Volume II: The History of Empires (2021).
• Power, Patronage, and Memory in Early Islam. Ed., with Alain George. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2018).
• Public Execution in the Umayyad Period: Early Islamic Punitive Practice and Its Late Antique Context. Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 11:4 pp. 101-136 (2011).
• Rituals of Islamic Monarchy: Accession and Succession in the First Muslim Empire. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (2009).