Andrew Kurt
Visiting Lecturer
Ph.D., University of Toronto, 2002
phone: 404-413-5895
email: akurt@gsu.edu
Dr. Kurt has been a Visiting Assistant Professor at Western Carolina University, Grand Valley State University and University of Wisconsin – Green Bay. His Ph.D. is from the University of Toronto, where he specialized on medieval Spain. He has taught courses in Islamic history, Middle East regional studies, Christian-Muslim Relations, and Medieval European history. He will soon publish a book with Moneta Press (Wetteren) derived from his dissertation, titled Minting, State and Economy in the Visigothic Kingdom: From Settlement in Aquitaine through the First Decade of the Muslim Conquest of Spain. He has spoken and written on interconfessional relations in Iberia and the Horn of Africa during the Middle Ages. He has also recently published “Afghanistan’s Current Situation and the Outlook for the Future: An Interview with Thomas Gouttierre,” Digest of Middle East Studies 19.2 (Fall 2010), 213-27. He is presently working on a joint publication with a student in the History Department on archival material from the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library regarding the information, discussions and decision-making in the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan in 1978-80.
Currently Dr. Kurt is investigating the many contacts between European and Ethiopian rulers in the 14th to 16th centuries aimed primarily at a Crusade against Muslim states in the Red Sea region. He hopes his examination of Muslim sources and Christian sources (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Ethiopian) will help him to create a narrative of the multi-faceted relations between peoples of different continents at a time of continuing discovery. In May of 2009 he delivered a paper titled "Mapping Prester John as African (1350-1600): the Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese Perspectives," at the International Medieval Congress at Western Michigan University. In October he gave a paper at the Southeast Regional Middle East and Islamic Studies Seminar titled "Between Holy War and Symbiosis: the Delicate Balance of Late Medieval Ethiopia, the Neighboring Sultanates, and Mamluk Egypt." Both are being expanded as articles.
Minting, State and Economy in the Visigothic Kingdom: From Settlement in Aquitaine through the First Decade of the Muslim Conquest of Spain (Wetteren: Moneta, forthcoming 2012).
Review of: Wolfgang Danspeckgruber, ed., Working Toward Peace & Prosperity in Afghanistan (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2011); forthcoming review in Digest of Middle East Studies 20.2 (Spring 2012).
"The Search for Prester John, a Projected Crusade, and the Eroding Prestige of Ethiopian Kings - ca. 1200 to 1543," 28-pg ms. (currently under review).
"Spain and North Africa (1400-1900)," "Pasha, Judar (Morocco) – ca. 1590," "Falasha Judaism," Cultural Sociology of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2012).
"Norwich Crusade," "Behetrías," "Good Parliament," "Manorial Courts," "Bailiff," Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
"The Places and Purposes of Minting in the Earliest Medieval Kingdoms," in Brian Catlos, ed., A World of Economics and History: Essays in Honor of Professor Andrew M. Watson (Publicacions de la Universitat de Valencia, 2009), 33-54.
Review of: Thomas E. Burman, Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560 (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press). Reviewed for American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain Newsletter, Fall 2009.
"New Treasures from Barbarian Spain," Journal of the Classical and Medieval Numismatic Society, ser. 2, vol. 4, no. 2 (June 2003), 63-91.
With Peter Bartlett, "Nueva ceca visigoda: Lorca (Iliocri[ca]) y sus nexos con las cecas del sur," Numisma (no. 241, Jan.- Dec. 1998), 27-39.