Jack Tannous earned his PhD at Princeton University in 2010. His interests lie in the cultural history of the eastern Mediterranean, especially the Middle East, in the Late Antique and early medieval period. His research focuses on the Syriac-speaking Christian communities of the Near East in this period and also in a number of other, related areas, including Eastern Christian Studies more broadly, Patristics/early Christian studies, Greco-Syriac and Greco-Arabic translation, Christian-Muslim interactions, sectarianism and identity, early Islamic history, the history of the Arabic Bible, and the Quran.
Tannous is working on a book entitled Lovers of Labor at the End of the Ancient World: Syriac Scholars Between Byzantium and Islam. His book The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers (Princeton University Press) was published in 2018.
With Scott Johnson (University of Oklahoma), Tannous created and maintains the site syri.ac, an online resource for Syriac studies, originally hosted at Dumbarton Oaks and now at the University of Oklahoma.
Professor Tannous is an executive committee member for the Program in Medieval Studies. Read his full bio on the Department of History website.
