Justin Stearns

Justin Stearns received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2007, and has taught in the Arab Crossroads Program in New York University Abu Dhabi since 2010. His first book was Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Pre-Modern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) and he has published articles in Islamic Law and Society, Medieval Encounters, Al-Qantara, and History Compass.  His second book on the social status of the natural sciences in early modern Morocco entitled Revealed Sciences: The Natural Sciences in Islam in Seventeenth Century Morocco, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2021. He is currently working on an edition and translation of al-Yusi’s Discourses for the Library of Arabic Literature, the first volume of which appeared in 2020.

Selected Publications

Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Premodern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2011).

The Discourses: Reflections on History, Sufism, Theology, and Literature―Volume One, (Translation and Critical Edition. Library of Arabic Literature) (New York: NYU University Press, 2020).

Revealed Sciences:  The Natural Sciences in Islam in Seventeenth Century Morocco (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2021).

“Writing the History of the Natural Sciences in the pre-modern Muslim world:  Historiography, Religion, and the Importance of the Early Modern Period,” History Compass, v. 9 (2011), 923–51.

“Contagion in Theology and Law: Ethical Considerations in the Writings of two 14th-Century Scholars of Nasrid Granada,” Islamic Law and Society, v. 14 (2007), 109–29.