Luke Yarbrough, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, for the 2012 fall term. The 2012–13 theme for the interdisciplinary program is “Institutionalization, Innovation, and Conflict in 13th-Century Judaism: A Comparative View.”

Yarbrough plans to spend his time producing a full critical edition and translation of a thirteenth-century work that marries political advice to religious polemic. Entitled Tajrīd sayf al-himma li-istikhrāj mā fī dhimmat al-dhimma (Drawing the sword of ambition to extract what is owed by the dhimmīs), it was authored by the bureaucrat and judge ^cUthmān b. Ibrāhīm al-Nābulusī (d. 1262) to persuade an Ayyubid sultan to dismiss non-Muslim officials. No complete edition has yet been made, nor any section critically edited from the three extant manuscripts. He will also study the work in comparison with similar exclusionary literary productions from other Middle Eastern and Eurasian polities in the same period.