I retired from the History Department of Columbia University in 2015 after 39 years of service. Before that I taught at Harvard for six years and at UC Berkeley for two. All that redeems me from being identified as a pure academic is the enjoyment I derive from writing fiction. My first novel, Kicked to Death by a Camel, was nominated for an Edgar in the category of Best First Mystery. Some readers have maintained that the best thing about it was the title. Neither Kicked to Death nor any of my subsequent novels, most recently Chakra and The One-Donkey Solution, met much commercial success, but they enabled me to make stories out of my personal experiences, mostly during travels to the Middle East.
My academic writings deal either with Islam, human-animal relations, or the history of technology. In all three cases, my greatest satisfaction comes from asking unusual or previously unasked questions and exploring innovative methods in trying to answer them. When I came to Columbia, a colleague who was opposed to my appointment predicted that I would never write "real" history. Maybe I haven't. That's for others to judge. All I can say is that I don't think I have written any history that could have been written by someone else.
Personally, I come from Rockford, Illinois and consider myself a lapsed Methodist. That is to say, I recognize that the conduct of my life has been strongly influenced by the social expectations of Methodism, but I have long departed from the theology and rituals of any church. I have no personal or family roots in the Middle East or in Islam--or on a farm, for that matter. Though my early research and writing concentrated on the social and economic aspects of medieval Islam, and of Iran in particular, after the Iranian Revolution I became more actively involved in contemporary affairs. In particular, I pay close attention to religious political currents in the Muslim world and to the ups and downs of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which I feel constitutes one of the major political and social experiments of our time.
After 50 years as a Middle East/Islam specialist, I'm pretty tired of reading about that subject. Thus my most recent book, The Wheel: Inventions and Reinventions, was a joy to research and write since it dealt with the entire world from 4000 BCE onward.
My non-academic reading preferences lean to speculative fiction, most recently Neal Stephenson, Steven Erikson, Ian Isslemont, and China Miéville Richard Morgan), along with graphic novels by the likes of Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore, and older experimental writers like John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis.
I have made 40+ classroom lectures on World History available for free on YouTube and similar courses on Modern Middle East History and Iranian History Down to the Safavid Period on iTunes University/Columbia.
