NES Faculty

Shaun Marmon
Associate Professor in Religion

email: marmon@princeton.edu

I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton in 1990. I have taught in history departments at Johns Hopkins University (as a Mellon fellow) and at the University of Rhode Island. Before joining the department of Religion at Princeton in 1993, I spent two years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton as a fellow of the School of Historical Studies. My broad area of study is the Medieval Arabic and Islamic Middle East although I have also done some work in the early modern and modern periods. I am most at home in the Mamluk Empire, especially Egypt.

The questions that interest me include topics like death and the afterlife, gender and the representation of desire, the symbolics of power and the shifting boundaries between the sacred and the profane in Medieval Islam. By first book, Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries in Islamic Society, addresses some of these issues. I am currently working on a new book entitled "The Quality of Mercy: Intercession in Mamluk Society." I am also completing a monograph on representations of "dangerous old women" and sexuality in Mamluk texts.

My teaching includes both graduate and undergraduate courses which are cross-listed in the Department of Religion and the Department of Near Eastern Studies.