Elias Muhanna is a scholar of Islamic history and classical Arabic literature at Brown University. His research has focused on the history of encyclopedic texts and practices in the Islamic world and Europe, the cultural production of the Mamluk Empire (1250-1517), travel literature in the early modern Mediterranean, and the history of the Arabic language. He earned his doctorate in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations at Harvard University and has held fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Whiting Foundation.
Muhanna’s first monograph, The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2018) won the Morris D. Forkosch Book Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas and the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America. His abridged translation of the 14th-century Arabic encyclopedia The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition (Penguin Classics, 2016) was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by NPR and The Guardian. Muhanna is also the translator of The Book of Travels (NYU Press, 2020), the 18th-century account of the voyage from Aleppo to Paris by Hanna Diyab, the author of “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp” and other tales from The 1,001 Nights. He has published two edited volumes – The Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies (De Gruyter, 2016) and The Languages of the Mamluk Empire (MSR, 2025) – and is currently at work on a cultural history of the Arabic language and its vernaculars, scheduled for publication in Fall 2027 by Penguin Press.
Muhanna’s essays and criticism appear regularly in the mainstream press. He has contributed to The New Yorker since 2014, and has written for The London Review of Books, The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, and other periodicals.
In 2024, Muhanna was awarded the John Rowe Workman Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Humanities. He has offered courses on the history of Orientalism, the reception of the Quran in world literature, the history of encyclopedism, The 1,001 Nights, the 19th-century Arab Renaissance, and various other topics. He has served as director of the Center for Middle East Studies (2024-27), director of undergraduate studies for the Department of Comparative Literature (2021-2025), and director of the Digital Islamic Humanities Project (2013-2017).
Muhanna welcomes inquiries from prospective PhD students interested in Islamic intellectual history, language and culture in the premodern Arabophone world, encyclopedic texts and practices, book history, Orientalism, and classical Arabic literature and literary theory.
