Joel Blecher is Associate Professor of History at The George Washington University and the author of Said the Prophet of God: Hadith Commentary Across a Millennium (University of California Press, 2018; Arabic translation 2021).
His work, which is grounded in archives and field sites in Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey, and India, has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.
He was named the Bayard Dodge Distinguished Visiting Professor at the American University in Cairo in 2023-2024, and he has worked to expand public discourse on the Islamic world through his engagement with public radio, The Atlantic, Penguin Classics, and numerous podcasts.
He is currently working on Age of Spice: Islam’s World of Trade before the Rise of Europe for Basic Books.
He is the translator, along with Mairaj Syed, of the first English translation of the Islamic world’s preeminent meditation on plagues and pandemics: Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani’s Merits of the Plague (Penguin Classics, 2023).
He is also co-editor, with Stefanie Brinkmann, of the first volume of scholarly essays ever published on the key texts and critical themes of hadith commentary across diverse periods, regions, and sects: Hadith Commentary: Continuity and Change (Edinburgh University Press, May 2023).
contact: jblecher@gwu.edu