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from http://www.admin.ias.edu/pr/Newsletter/Winter97Content.htm
The Institute for Advanced Study has announced the appointment of Patricia Crone as a permanent Faculty member in the School of Historical Studies. Dr. Crone, who is presently at Cambridge University, will be in residence at the Institute as of the beginning of the fall term in September 1997.
“Dr. Crone’s work focuses on one of the most remarkable periods in history,” commented Phillip A. Griffiths, Director of the Institute. “She has brought a new perspective to the question of how and why Islamic culture was formed.”
Dr. Crone’s scholarly and intellectual activities have concentrated on one of the most basic and complex problems of the history of Late Antiquity and of the early Middle Ages: how, between ca. 630 and 900, a recognized Islamic culture appeared and came to dominate a huge area, from Spain to the frontiers of China and India.
“She has challenged long-held explanations,” stated Professor Oleg Grabar, of the School of Historical Studies, “and thanks to a mastery of all contemporary sources, provided new approaches for the social, economic, legal and religious patterns which transformed late antiquity.”
Patricia Crone was born in Denmark and received her early education in Copenhagen. She completed her undergraduate and graduate work at the University of London, receiving a Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London in 1974. For the next three years she served as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of London’s Warburg Institute. In 1977 she became a Fellow of Jesus College and University Lecturer in Islamic history at Oxford University. Dr. Crone became Assistant University Lecturer in Islamic studies and Fellow of Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge University in 1990, and has held several positions at Cambridge since then. She served as University Lecturer in Islamic studies from 1992-94, and Reader in Islamic history from 1994 until her appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study.
The author of numerous articles and reviews, Dr. Crone has also written six books: Hagarism, the Making of the Islamic World (with Michael Cook); Slaves on Horses, the Evolution of the Islamic Polity; God’s Caliph, Religious Authority in the First Centuries of Islam; Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law; Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam; and Pre-Industrial Societies. She serves on the editorial boards of The International History Review, Arabica, and Islamic Law and Society, and was editor (until 1992), with J.A. Hall, of the series Explorations in Social Structure. She is also a member of the editorial board of the series Studies in Human Society.