Hannah Barker
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Mail code: 4302Campus: Tempe
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Hannah Barker is an associate professor of history at Arizona State University. Her research centers on connections between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean in the late medieval period, especially the trade in slaves which flourished during the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. Her first book, dealing with the processes of shipping, marketing, and purchasing slaves and the Genoese, Mamluk, and Venetian merchants who conducted this trade, is That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500. It was awarded the Paul E. Lovejoy Prize by the Journal of Global Slavery, the ASU Institute for Humanities Research book prize, and honorable mentions for the Middle East Medievalists Book Prize and the Mediterranean Seminar's Wadjih F. al-Hamwi Prize for the best first book in Mediterranean studies. Her current interests include changes in status (enslavement and manumission); the role of physicians in slave markets; Mamluk ethnographic comparisons between northern and southern barbarians; and local slaving patterns in the Black Sea region.
Prof. Barker is on sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2024-2025.
- Ph.D. History, Columbia University
- M.A. History, Columbia University
- B.A. History and Physics, University of Chicago
Slavery and the slave trade; comparative history of slavery
Medieval ideas of race and ethnicity
Travel and cross-cultural encounters in the medieval Mediterranean
New approaches to the study of the second plague pandemic (the Black Death)
Legal, medical, social, and economic history
History of Italy; Genoa; Venice
History of Egypt and Syria; Mamluks
History of the Black Sea
Books
- That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
Articles
- “Good Friends Meet Again: Power, Emotion, and Tartar-Venetian Relations in the Memoirs of Giosafat Barbaro.” The Medieval Globe 10, no. 1 (2024): 69-100. [Open Access]
- “La pierre et l’eau. Quêtes d’autonomie de femmes en esclavage (Méditerranée, fin du Moyen Âge).” Translated by Guillaume Calafat. Clio. Femmes, genre, histoire 59, no. 1 (June 2024): 23-43. [Open Access]
- Co-authored with Chen Chen. "Pandemic Outbreaks and the Language of Violence: Discussing the Origins of the Black Death and COVID-19.” CHEST 162, no. 1 (July 2022): 196-201.
- “The Risk of Birth: Life Insurance for Enslaved Pregnant Women in Fifteenth-Century Genoa.” Journal of Global Slavery 6, no. 2 (2021): 1-31.
- "Laying the Corpses to Rest: Grain Embargoes and the Early Transmission of the Black Death in the Black Sea, 1346-1347," Speculum 96, no. 1 (2021): 97-126.
- "Purchasing a Slave in Fourteenth-Century Cairo: Ibn al-Akfānī’s Book of Observation and Inspection in the Examination of Slaves," Mamluk Studies Review 19 (2016): 1-24. [Open Access]
- "Reconnecting with the Homeland: Black Sea Slaves in Mamluk Biographical Dictionaries," Medieval Prosopography 30 (2015): 87-104.
Book Chapters
- “Boys Like Gold Coins: The Trade in Mamluks for the Mamluk Sultanate.” In Exchange in the Mamluk Sultanate: Economic and Cultural, ed. Marlis J. Saleh, 1-16. Peeters: Louvain, 2023.
- "Slavery in the Black Sea Region.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Global Slavery throughout History, ed. Damian Pargas and Juliane Schiel, 159-178. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. [Open Access]
- “The Trade in Slaves in the Black Sea, Russia, and Eastern Europe.” In The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 2, AD 500 - AD 1420, ed. Craig Perry, David Eltis, Stanley Engerman, and David Richardson, 100-122. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
- "What Caused the Fourteenth-Century Tatar-Circassian Shift?" In Slavery in the Black Sea Region, c. 900-1900: Forms of Unfreedom at the Intersection between Christianity and Islam, ed. Felicia Roşu, 339-363. Leiden: Brill, 2021.
- "Christianities in Conflict: The Black Sea as a Genoese Slaving Zone in the Later Middle Ages," in Slaving Zones: Cultural Identities, Ideologies, and Institutions in the Evolution of Global Slavery, ed. Jeff Fynn-Paul and Damian Alan Pargas (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 50-69.
Courses
2025 Spring
Course Number | Course Title |
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HST 599 | Thesis |
2024 Spring
Course Number | Course Title |
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HST 100 | Global History to 1500 |
HST 599 | Thesis |
HST 494 | Special Topics |
2023 Fall
Course Number | Course Title |
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HST 598 | Special Topics |
HST 349 | Early Middle Ages |
2023 Spring
Course Number | Course Title |
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HST 100 | Global History to 1500 |
HST 599 | Thesis |
HST 494 | Special Topics |
HST 494 | Special Topics |
HST 302 | Studies in History |
2022 Fall
Course Number | Course Title |
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HST 591 | Seminar |
HST 304 | Studies in European History |
2022 Spring
Course Number | Course Title |
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HST 100 | Global History to 1500 |
HST 599 | Thesis |
HST 494 | Special Topics |
HST 350 | Later Middle Ages |
HST 494 | Special Topics |
HST 493 | Honors Thesis |
2021 Fall
Course Number | Course Title |
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HST 598 | Special Topics |
HST 349 | Early Middle Ages |
HST 492 | Honors Directed Study |
2021 Spring
Course Number | Course Title |
---|---|
HST 599 | Thesis |
HST 493 | Honors Thesis |
2020 Fall
Course Number | Course Title |
---|---|
HST 492 | Honors Directed Study |
2020 Spring
Course Number | Course Title |
---|---|
HST 100 | Global History to 1500 |
HST 350 | Later Middle Ages |
HST 494 | Special Topics |
HST 494 | Special Topics |
2024-2025 Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study
2020-2021 ACLS Fellowship
2020-2021 Franklin Research Grant, American Philosophical Society
2016 Ezio Cappadocia Prize, Society for Italian Historical Studies
2013-2014 Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship
American Historical Association
Medieval Academy of America
Middle East Studies Association
Society for Italian Historical Studies
Middle East Medievalists