Professor Amira K. Bennison
- Professor in the History and Culture of the Maghrib
- Head of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies and Co-Chair of FAMES
- Director of the HRH Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies
- Chair of the Academic Publishing Committee of Cambridge University Press
Contact
Connect
Location
- Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 9DA
About
Amira K. Bennison studied History and Arabic at the University of Cambridge (1989) before travelling to Egypt to work as an intern at the American University of Cairo for a year. She then completed a Masters at Harvard University (1992), followed by a PhD at SOAS, University of London. Her PhD explored the impact of the French conquest of Algiers on religion-political discourses in the neighbouring 'Alawi Sultanate of Morocco. It was published as 'Jihad and its Interpretations in Pre-colonial Morocco' (2002).
She joined the University of Cambridge as a lecturer in 1997 and is currently Professor in the History and Culture of the Maghrib.
Research
Research interests
- History and Culture of the medieval Maghrib
- Political Legitimacy in the pre-modern Islamic World
- Islamic urbanism and architecture
Professor Bennison's research explores political legitimacy within North Africa from several perspectives. Her PhD looked at religion-political discourse and legitimation from the perspective of jihad. Since then she has explored the theme in relation to urbanism and architecture from early medieval to early modern times, an approach stimulated by her work in cultural tourism across the Middle East and North Africa. She works with a range of primary sources in Arabic, especially medieval dynastic chronicles, to see how authors represent the urban actions of rulers. Other sources such as biographical dictionaries provide insight into contestations of this narrative and glimpses of the city from below.
Recent Publications:
- 2025. ‘The Coming of the Almoravids: Help and Co-operation’, in Alejandro García-Sanjuán (ed.), The Taifa Kingdoms: Reconsidering 11th-century Iberia, Leiden: Brill.
- 2024. ‘Sainthood and social boundary-crossing in medieval Islamic North Africa’, al-Masāq 36: 2, pp. 176-193 (https://doi.org/10.1080/09503110.2024.2325318)
- 2023. ‘Articulating and Contesting Power in the Twelfth-Century Maghrib’, in Hannah Skoda (ed.), Handbook of Medieval Crime and Deviance, Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, pp. 243-257.
- 2022. ‘Traces of the Ancient: The pre-Islamic monuments of the Maghrib in the medieval Arabic geographical tradition’, in Javier Martínez Jiménez and Samuel Ottewill-Soulsby (eds), Remembering and Forgetting the Ancient City, Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 275-296.
- 2022. ‘Constantinople in the sixteenth-century Maghribī Imaginary: The Travelogue of ʿAlī al-Tamgrūtī’, in Elizabeth Key Fowden, Suna Çaǧaptay, Louise Blanke and Edward Zychowicz-Coghill (eds), Cities as Palimpsests? Responses to Antiquity in Eastern Mediterranean Urbanism, Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 372-386.
Teaching and supervision
- I teach medieval history and culture within a range of undergraduate courses.
- I co-teach a special subject in the History of the Pre-Modern Middle East. Currently 'Power, Patronage and Islamic Material Culture for undergraduate and MPhil students.
- I offer supervision to MPhil and PhD students wishing to research aspects of the history of the pre-modern Islamic West, i.e. North Africa and the Iberian peninsula.
I shall be on sabbatical in 2026-27 and not accepting postgraduates students for that academic year.