Deborah Tor

Biography

Professor Tor specializes in the political, social, religious, and military history of the Islamic medieval Middle East and Central Asia, from the rise of Islam until the 13th century. Her publications include five books, both single-authored and edited, on subjects ranging from the privatization of Jihad in the 8th century and the political disintegration of the Caliphate; to the period of the autonomous Persianate dynasties (c. 850-1220); cultural continuities and disruptions in the transition from the pre-Islamic to the Islamic period in the larger Iranian cultural world of the first millennium AD; the comparative study of civilizational formation in the ʿAbbasid and Carolingian periods; and the historical significance of the Islamic-Byzantine border from the rise of Islamic through the Crusades. Additionally, she has published numerous refereed articles and encyclopedia entries in leading journals and reference works in the field, on a broad variety of topics, including aspects of medieval Islamic military slavery; the survival and Islamization of Late Antique Iranian traditions of rulership; the splitting of ʿAbbāsid Shiʿism from ʿAlid Shiʿism in the 8th century; the ongoing struggles between caliphs and sultan in the Seljuq period; urban violence and factionalism in the medieval Middle East from the 9th through twelfth centuries; and a close analysis of al-Ghazālī’s Persian letters to viziers regarding governmental corruption around the turn of the twelfth century. She has also written various entries for the Encyclopedia of Islam, Encyclopedia Iranica, and The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought.
Professor Tor teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses on the medieval Middle East and Central Asia; on the Crusades as a Catholic religious movement; and broader Humanities courses such as the Glynn Honors Humanities Seminar and a College Seminar on “Time and Mortality.”

Tor has won numerous major research grants and awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies, the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, and Harvard University. She is the Medieval editor and board member of the journal Iranian Studies.