PhD (1990) - Hebrew University

Reuven Amitai is Eliahu Elath Professor for the History of the Muslim Peoples at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and director there of the Nehemia Levtzion Center for Islamic Studies. He studies and teaches the history of the pre-modern Islamic world, specializing in the following fields: the coming of the Turks and Mongols to the Middle East, Muslim responses to the Crusades, the Mamluk Sultanate, the Ilkhanate (the Mongol state in the Middle East), medieval Palestine, the military history of the pre-modern Muslim world, and conversion to Islam.

Professor Amitai studied for his B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and his M.A. and Ph.D. (1990) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has been a visiting fellow at Princeton University (1990-91) and St. Antony’s College (1996-97) in Oxford, and serves as Director of the Institute of Asian and African Studies at the Hebrew University.

His writings include "Mongols and Mamluks: The Mamluk-Ilkhanid War, 1260-1281" (Cambridge, 1995) and over fifty scholarly articles, and he has co-edited "The Mongol Empire and its Legacy" (with David Morgan, Leiden, 1999) and "Mongols, Turks and Others: Eurasian Nomads and Their Sedentary Neighbors" (with Michal Biran, Leiden, 2005). A collection of his articles, entitled "The Mongols in the Islamic Lands: Studies in the History of the Ilkhanate", will be published in 2007 by Ashgate in the Variorum Collected Studies Series. 

Currently, he is working on a study of the military history of the Mamluk Sultanate (1250-1517), as well as a monograph on the Islamization of the Mongols in the Middle East.