Eugenio
Garosi

Dr. Eugenio Garosi is an Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Haifa under the supervision of Dr. Uriel Simonsohn.

Eugenio specializes in the social history of the early Islamic Empire, with an emphasis on the role of languages and scribal practices in constructing social identities.

The main focus of his work lies in early Islamic documents on papyrus, paper, parchment and ostraca. Unlike the later Islamic literary tradition and the narratives of non-Muslim denominations living under Muslim rule, these documents were not redacted with posterity in mind and thus offer a comparatively unbiased perspective on their environment. Eugenio’s current research engages with expressions of religious identities through the lens of Arabic, Greek, and Coptic everyday writings in seventh to tenth-century Egypt. He is planning to explore the relationship between onomastic patterns and other social identifiers and subsequently inject empirical insights, gained from thousands of original documents, into debates on the related processes of Arabization and conversion to Islam, during the crucial first centuries following the Arab conquests.

Eugenio was born and raised in Italy before moving to Germany to complete an MA in Arabic and Islamic studies at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU). He then obtained a PhD in Arabic studies and ancient history from LMU and the University of Basel, researching two projects, “Change and Continuities from a Christian to a Muslim Society” and “The Arabic Papyrology Database,” under the supervision of Prof. Andreas Kaplony and Prof. Sabine Huebner. During postdoctoral fellowships at the Hebrew University’s Israel Institute for Advanced Studies and the University of Hamburg’s RomanIslam – Center for Comparative Empire and Transcultural Studies, Eugenio also explored the construction and negotiation of religious and cultural boundaries in pre-modern Islamicate societies. When not engaged in research, Eugenio enjoys reading, travelling, skiing, and going to the opera.