Cecilia Palombo, who earned her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies in 2020, has been hired to teach the History of Early Islam until 1250 in Chicago’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Palombo, whose advisor was Michael Cook, wrote her dissertation on “The Christian Clergy’s Islamic Local Government in Late Marwanid and Abbasid Egypt.” Prior to joining the NELC faculty, she held a postdoc at the Institute for Area Studies of Leiden University, in the ERC-project “Embedding Conquest: Naturalizing Muslim Rule in the Early Islamic Empire.” Palombo joins fellow NES-Ph.D.s Cornell Fleischer (Ph.D. 1982) and Orit Bashkin (Ph.D. 2005), as well as Professors Emeriti John Woods (Ph.D. 1974) and Fred Donner (Ph.D. 1975), on the NELC faculty. The late Richard Chambers (Ph.D. 1968) was also a member of the NELC faculty.