MEMO in conversation with Dr Justin Stearns

Join us for a conversation with Justin Stearns as he tells us about his work on 17th century Morocco, the history of the natural sciences and medicine before colonisation and the state of archives in the Arab World. 



Justin Stearns received his BA in English and History from Dartmouth College in 1998, and his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2007. He is Professor of Arab Crossroads Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi.  His research interests focus on the intersection of law, science, and theology in the pre-modern Muslim Middle East. His first book was a comparative intellectual history of Muslim and Christian understanding of contagion, especially in the context of the plague, entitled Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Pre-Modern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). His book on the social status of the natural sciences in early modern Morocco entitled Revealed Sciences: The Natural Sciences in Islam in Early Modern Morocco (Cambridge University Press) was published in 2021, and the first volume of his edition and translation of al-Yusi’s (d. 1102/1691) Discourses appeared with the Library of Arabic Literature in 2020. He is currently working on the second volume of The Discourses and together with a group of students is engaged in a long-term project to establish a searchable database of all catalogued Moroccan manuscripts.