Topic: The Tatars of the Sudan: Comparative Ethnography in Medieval Islamic Texts
Speaker: Hannah Barker, Arizona State University
Respondent: Kristina Richardson, CUNY
Hannah Barker is an assistant professor of medieval history at Arizona State University. She studies connections between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean during the late medieval period, especially the trade in slaves to Genoa, Venice, and the Mamluks. Her first book, That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500, was published in 2019. It received the Paul E. Lovejoy prize from the Journal of Global Slavery in 2020, the ASU Institute for Humanities Research book prize in 2021, and an honorable mention for the Wadjih F. al-Hamwi Prize for the best first book in Mediterranean studies by the Mediterranean Seminar in 2021.