Alexander Bevilacqua is associate professor of history at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He is the author of The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2018; paperback 2020), which was selected as one of the Times Literary Supplement books of the year and awarded the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association. He is also the co-editor with Frederic Clark of Thinking in the Past Tense: Eight Conversations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

His work has been supported by a number of organizations including the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the American Philosophical Society. He has held fellowships at the Harvard Society of Fellows, the Library of Congress, the Warburg Institute, and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin among others. His current project, The Mask of Battle: European Chivalry in the Age of Discovery, examines the impact of chivalry on early European imaginings of the world beyond Europe. An excerpt entitled “Race-Making Festivities in Brandenburg-Prussia” appeared in the journal Past and Present in 2024.

ab24 (at) williams.edu