Carl Petry

Islamic world and North Africa; medieval and modern Egypt

Office: 104B Harris
Phone: 847-491-7448
E-mail: c-petrynorthwestern.edu

Carl Petry (Ph.D. Michigan, 1974), Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence, specializes in the Islamic World and North Africa, medieval and modern Egypt, and the social history of the Middle East. He has written The Civilian Elite of Cairo in the Later Middle Ages, a study based on a computerized data file containing biographies of 5000 persons active in the administrative and scholastic communities of that city, and subsequent analyses of the political economy of Egypt preceding the Ottoman Conquest titled: Twilight of Majesty: The Reigns of the Mamluk Sultans al-Ashraf Qaytbay and Qansuh al-Ghawri in Egypt (a Choice outstanding book, 1993), and Protectors or Praetorians? The Last Mamluk Sultans and Egypt's Waning as a Great Power. He has edited and contributed to volume I of The Cambridge History of Egypt: Islamic Egypt, 640-1517. His research has been supported by grants from the American Research Center in Egypt, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the J. S. Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is currently engaged in a study of crime and criminal prosecution in the medieval Islamic world. Teaching interests range from gender relations in pre-modern Muslim societies to the politics of revolutionary Egypt under Nasser and Sadat in the mid-twentieth century.

Curriculum Vitae