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Hannah Barker
Biography:
Hannah Barker is an assistant professor of history at Arizona State University. Her research centers on connections between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea in the late medieval period, especially the trade in slaves which flourished during the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. Her first book, dealing with the processes of shipping, marketing, and purchasing slaves and the Genoese, Mamluk, and Venetian merchants who conducted this trade, is That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500. It was awarded the Paul E. Lovejoy Prize by the Journal of Global Slavery in 2020, the ASU Institute for Humanities Research book prize in 2021, and an honorable mention for the Wadjih F. al-Hamwi Prize for the best first book in Mediterranean studies by the Mediterranean Seminar in 2021. Barker is currently interested in early transmission of the Black Death from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean; life insurance for enslaved pregnant women in Genoa; how medieval Genoese notaries described slaves in legal acts; comparisons between northern and southern barbarians in Mamluk texts; and local slaving patterns in the Golden Horde and Caucasus regions.
Education:
- Ph.D. History, Columbia University 2014
- M.A. History, Columbia University 2009
- B.A. History and Physics, University of Chicago 2005
Images
Research Interests:
Slavery and the slave trade; comparative history of slavery
Medieval ideas of race and ethnicity
Travel and cross-cultural encounters in the medieval Mediterranean
New approaches to the study of the second plague pandemic (the Black Death)
Legal, medical, social, and economic history
History of Italy; Genoa; Venice
History of Egypt and Syria; Mamluks
History of the Black Sea
Publications:
Books
- That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
Articles and Book Chapters
- “The Risk of Birth: Life Insurance for Enslaved Pregnant Women in Fifteenth-Century Genoa.” Journal of Global Slavery 6, no. 2 (2021): 1-31.
- "Laying the Corpses to Rest: Grain Embargoes and the Early Transmission of the Black Death in the Black Sea, 1346-1347," Speculum 96, no. 1 (2021): 97-126.
- "Christianities in Conflict: The Black Sea as a Genoese Slaving Zone in the Later Middle Ages," in Slaving Zones: Cultural Identities, Ideologies, and Institutions in the Evolution of Global Slavery, ed. Jeff Fynn-Paul and Damian Alan Pargas (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 50-69.
- "Purchasing a Slave in Fourteenth-Century Cairo: Ibn al-Akfānī’s Book of Observation and Inspection in the Examination of Slaves," Mamluk Studies Review 19 (2016): 1-24.
- "Reconnecting with the Homeland: Black Sea Slaves in Mamluk Biographical Dictionaries," Medieval Prosopography 30 (2015): 87-104.
- "Egypt and the Black Sea Slave Trade During the Thirteenth Century," Bulletin of the American Research Center in Egypt 199 (2011): 33-35.
Teaching Website URL:
| Spring 2021 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| HST 493 | Honors Thesis |
| HST 599 | Thesis |
| Fall 2020 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| HST 492 | Honors Directed Study |
| Spring 2020 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| HST 100 | Global History to 1500 |
| HST 350 | Later Middle Ages |
| HST 494 | Special Topics |
| Fall 2019 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| HST 349 | Early Middle Ages |
| HST 494 | Special Topics |
| HST 495 | Methods of Historical Inquiry |
| Spring 2019 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| HST 100 | Global History to 1500 |
| HST 350 | Later Middle Ages |
| Fall 2018 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| HST 349 | Early Middle Ages |
Presentations:
Honors / Awards:
2020-2021 ACLS Fellowship
2020-2021 Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Fellowship
2020-2021 Franklin Research Grant, American Philosophical Society
2016 Ezio Cappadocia Prize, Society for Italian Historical Studies
2013-2014 Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship
Professional Associations:
American Historical Association
Medieval Academy of America
Middle East Studies Association
Society for Italian Historical Studies
Middle East Medievalists