Fred Donner

Fred M. Donner has been on the faculty of the University of Chicago since 1982. An early interest in the relationship between pastoral nomads and the Islamic state resulted in his first book, The Early Islamic Conquests (1981). Work on the early Islamic period for his first book raised questions about the sources for that history, and led him to investigate more deeply the early development of Islamic historical writing, resulting in his second book, Narratives of Islamic Origins (1997). This in turn caused him to ask how early Islam actually coalesced as a religion, explored in his most recent book, Muhammad and the Believers: at the origins of Islam (2010). He has translated a volume of the medieval Arabic chronicle of al–Tabari (1993), written over forty scholarly articles, numerous encyclopedia entries, and scores of reviews, and has received research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is currently (2011) President–Elect of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, and in 2008 received MESA's Jere L. Bacharach Award for Service to the Profession of Middle Eastern Studies. He received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies (1975) from Princeton University, with study of Arabic in Lebanon (1966–67) and of Oriental Philology at the University of Erlangen, Germany (1970–71). He has also taught at Yale University (1975–1982)