Alexander Bevilacqua is associate professor of history at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts (faculty webpage). He is the author of The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2018; paperback 2020), which was selected as one of the Times Literary Supplement books of the year and awarded the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association. He is also the co-editor with Frederic Clark of Thinking in the Past Tense: Eight Conversations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

His work has been supported by a number of organizations including the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the American Philosophical Society. He has held fellowships at the Harvard Society of Fellows, the Library of Congress, the Warburg Institute, and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin among others. His current project, The Face of Battle: Chivalry and the Racial Imagination, examines the performance of human difference at European princely courts. An excerpt from this research entitled “Race-Making Festivities in Brandenburg-Prussia” appeared in Past and Present in November 2024.

ab24 (at) williams.edu