In Senses of Mourning, Babak Rahimi analyzes Moharram in Shi‘i Iran through the five senses (sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste) with an emphasis on the relationship between the religious practices as embodied experiences and how these performances—and practitioners’ experiences of them—changed over time.

Temptations in Ruin examines the political-economic afterlife of the Armenian genocide in present-day Turkey, focusing on the region of Muş (Moush). Anthropologist Alice von Bieberstein explores how the 1915 genocide and dispossession of Armenians shaped property regimes, citizenship, and economic logics that continue to reverberate today.

In Forensic Fantasies, anthropologist Başak Can examines how progressive doctors, medical institutions, and state forces in Turkey use forensic methods to detect, erase, and reveal evidence of state violence.

After Revelation integrates Jewish legal thought in the medieval Islamic world into its larger environment. Traveling from Baghdad to Cairo and bookending with accounts of medieval Jewish luminaries Saadia Gaon and Moses Maimonides, Marc D. Herman underscores that medieval Judaism evolved into the shapes that it did through contact with Islam.

Occasions for Poetry is a history of how Turkish poetry became the preferred mode for communicating, debating, and shaping political and social experience in the early Ottoman Empire. Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano reveals the ways in which literary language affected bureaucratic practice and became a means to advance one’s own political career.

Through an exploration of the imagery of the kibbutz in the stormy transition into Israeli statehood, State of Shock argues that the establishment of the State of Israel was a trauma that destabilized the kibbutz’s deepest conceptual ground and shifted its history, turning it, politically and culturally, from avant-garde to fetish.

In Plain Sight explores how Muslims, seemingly hostile to the crusading enterprise, integrated themselves into the Kingdom of Jerusalem, founded in the wake of the First Crusade. Ann E. Zimo draws not only on the well-known Frankish sources, but also the Arabic documentary base, to shed new light on Frankish society and how Muslims fit into it.

Historian Yoram Meital interprets Cairo’s synagogues as exquisite storytellers. Meital contends that studying the congregations and the social services provided in synagogues sheds new light on the transformation Egyptian society and its Jewish community underwent from 1875 to the present.

Living with the Law explores the marital disputes of Jews in medieval Islamic Egypt (1000–1250), and considers how ordinary Jews, especially women, experienced communal life under Islam and Jewish law. Oded Zinger concludes that the maintenance of a network of social relations with men protected women at different stages of their lives.

Death of the Desert offers a fresh examination of Archbishop Theophilus of Alexandria's banishment of the so-called Tall Brothers, four Origenist monks who led monastic communities in the western Egyptian desert, and brings into dialogue narrative strands that have largely been separated in the scholarly tradition.