Michael Penn

Michael Penn received his Ph.D. from the Department of Religion at Duke University where he also obtained a certificate in Women's Studies. Dr. Penn currently teaches at Mount Holyoke College and is a specialist in the history of early Christianity, especially that of Christians who spoke the Aramaic dialect of Syriac. Penn's current research focuses on the reaction of Syriac speaking Christians to the rise of Islam. While at ISAW he will be finishing a book entitled Imaging Islam. This project asks how our understanding of early Christian-Muslim relations and of early Islam would change were we to move Syriac sources from the periphery to the center of historical analysis. Dr. Penn is also interested more broadly in late antique and early medieval manuscript culture. Currently he is collaborating with a computer scientist at Smith College to apply recent advances in digital handwriting recognition to the analysis of ancient texts.