Andrew Marsham studied History at Oxford, where he became interested in the formative period of Islam and its wider context in world history. He went on to postgraduate study at Oxford in Arabic and Islamic History, and Arabic study in Egypt and Syria, before teaching and researching in Sheffield, Cambridge, Manchester and Edinburgh. His Rituals of Islamic Monarchy (Edinburgh, 2009), is the first full length study of the pledges of allegiance given to the rulers of the early Muslim Empire. He has also written on the execution of rebels, on history writing in Arabic, and on the early Muslim Empire and its Late Antique context. He recently edited The Umayyad World (Routledge, 2021) and co-edited Power, Patronage and Memory in Early Islam (Oxford, 2018) with Alain George (Oxford). He is currently working on The Umayyad Empire (644–750 CE), forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press.
Professor Marsham teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses relating to the history and culture of the Middle East
Professor Marsham is happy to supervise graduate students in work relating to pre-modern Islamic History.
- Empire and state formation in Late Antiquity and early Islam
- Comparative and transregional histories of North Africa and West Eurasia
- Medieval chronicles and universal histories in Arabic
- Ritual in late antique and early Islamic political culture
- Documents and scribes in early Islamic political culture
Current PhD students
| Aliya Abdukadir Ali: Networks of power in Iran and Iraq under the Umayyads |
| Mohammed Ahmed: Early Muslim-Jewish Relations through Late Texts: An Analysis of Al-Tabari's Tafsir on the Medinan Period |
| Maria Gajewska: Networks of Trust in the First Global Economy |
