Date: Apr 09, 2010

Hofstra History Professor Simon Doubleday Awarded a Prestigious 2010-2011 NEH Grant Award Will Support the Project: "The Berbers in Medieval Iberia and the Maghreb"

Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY … Hofstra University Associate Professor of History Simon Doubleday has been awarded a five-month 2010-2011 NEH Teaching Development Fellowship for a project titled, “The Berbers in Medieval Iberia and the Maghreb,” aimed at enhancing course offerings on the medieval relationship between the ‘West’ and the ‘Islamic world.’

Dr. Doubleday’s project will focus on the period between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries in which a Berber dynasty known as the Almohads was dominant both in northwest Africa and across the Straits of Gibraltar in Spain. The concrete objective of the project will be to develop a web-based selection of annotated short texts – accompanied by brief suggestions for further reading, study questions, and key terminology – and to advance the discussion of questions such as: Has the Maghreb always been a source of Islamic fundamentalism? Is there an inevitable divide between the north and south Mediterranean? And how can we conceptualize partnerships between north and south in a way that avoids colonial thinking?

Hofstra’s History Department aims to cultivate students' awareness of the many advantages of the study of history. Among these are a heightened understanding of the long-term historical causes that shape our present, and an ability to recognize and critique those myths of the past to which, as citizens, students are inevitably exposed.
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