Reyhan Durmaz

Reyhan Durmaz's research interests include Syriac Christianity, religion in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, hagiography, and Christian-Muslim relations in the medieval Middle East.

Her first monograph, Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and Beyond (University of California Press, October 2022), examines the transmissions of non-biblical saints' stories and cults from Christianity to Islam. Dr. Durmaz's dissertation project (Brown University, 2019), on which her book is based,  received a Joukowsky Outstanding Dissertation Award in Humanities. She also held a Junior Fellowship in Byzantine Studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection (AY 2018-19), and a Charlotte Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation while working on this project.

Stories between Christianity and Islam was shortlisted for AAR's Best First Book in the History of Religions Award and for the Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion (Historical Studies). Dr. Durmaz's book also received Honorable Mention by the Middle East Medievalists Book Prize Committee.

For her second book, Dr. Durmaz studies rural forms and expressions of Christianity in the medieval Middle East through the lens of soldier-civilian relations. The book is tentatively titled "Do Prophets Come with a Sword?" Soldiers, Paramilitary Action, and Religion in the Early Medieval Middle East. She began working on this project during her fellowship as the Faculty Research Fellow at Fordham University's Orthodox Christian Studies Center in the AY 2022-23. Some of the themes central to this project were discussed in a Boardman online talk series she organized, Destabilizing Religion in the Medieval Middle East (February-March 2022), which examined the categories of religion and non-religion in the context of the medieval Middle East. Her recent research have been published in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Church History and Religious Culture, Studies in Late Antiquity, among other venues. In connection to her new project, Dr. Durmaz is building a digital photograph archive of medieval churches and monasteries – Visualizing Countryside, which received the Delaware Valley Digital Project Prize. She is also translating a Syriac soldier-monk's life, the Life of Aho of Rish'ayno, as part of her new project.

You can learn more about Dr. Durmaz's research projects in her interview in the Women Scholars of Orthodox Christianity series, her online talk at the East of Byzantium Workshop, and her interview in the Exploring the Quran and the Bible channel.

During her time as a Faculty Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center's Forum on Migration (AY 2021-22), Dr. Durmaz also started working on the first Arabic newspaper published in the United States, Kawkab America, analyzing the ways Middle Eastern immigrants in NYC articulated religion and religious diversity in 19th-century America. You can hear more about this project in Dr. Durmaz's talk, Immigrant Voices on Paper, at the Material Texts Workshop at the University of Pennsylvania. Her study of Kawkab Amrika is published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

Dr. Durmaz is affiliated with the Ancient History Graduate Group, Global Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Graduate Group, and the Middle East Center at Penn, and a member of the American Academy of Religion, Society of Biblical Literature, North American Patristics Society, Byzantine Studies Association of North  America, and the Middle East Studies Association. She serves as the co-chair of the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins.

Dr. Durmaz teaches a broad variety of undergraduate and graduate courses, including Religions of the West, Satan: History, Poetics, and Politics of the Archenemy, From Jesus to Muhammad, Material Christianities, Worlds of Late Antiquity, and Orthodox America.