The Tunisia Office of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University hosted our panel seminar entitled ‘Tunisia in the Global Middle Ages’, on 27 June 2022. All the presentations were delivered by our project’s researchers: Dr Alex Metcalfe, Dr Hervin Fernandez-Aceves and Dr Marco Muresu. Each one of them had the opportunity to present their own papers, which then were brought together into a inspiring discussion with the respondent, Professor William E. Granara, and a very participative Tunisian and international audience.
The presentations were the following:
Alex Metcalfe: “New evidence for the source and supply of silver dirhams in early ʿAbbāsid Tunisia”
Hervin Fernández-Aceves: “The making of medieval Tunisia and Sardinia: Parallel or divergent histories”
Marco Muresu: “The minting of gold coinage at Byzantine Carthage: Its rise and fall?”
Speaking of the seminar, William Granara, Research Professor of Arabic at Harvard said: ‘The papers were enthusiastically received by an audience of Tunisian academics and Harvard graduate students. They offered important new leads and conclusions about the large-scale movements of precious metals over very large distances in the earliest phases of the “global Middle Ages”. This is exciting work for a range of academics – from Arabists, Byzantinists and medieval historians to Africanists and scholars of the Viking age.’
