Michael G. Morony

Short Biography

Michael Morony is mainly interested in the social and economic history and historiography of western Asia from Late Antiquity to the early Islamic period. His interest in the incantation bowls is mainly as a source for social history. His main monograph Iraq after the Muslim Conquest (Princeton 1983) examined patterns of historical continuity and change from Sasanian to early Islamic Iraq. Recent work includes two edited volumes on Production and the Exploitation of Resources (Ashgate/Variorum, 2002) and on Manufacturing and Labour (Ashgate/Variourm, 2003) and articles on ‘Magic and Society in Late Sasanian Iraq’ in S. Noegel, J. Walker, and B. Wheeler, eds., Prayer, Magic and the Stars in the Ancient and Late Antique World (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003); ‘Economic Boundaries? Late Antiquity and Early Islam’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 47.2 (2004); ‘History and Identity in the Syrian Churches’ in J. J. Van Ginkel, H. L. Murre-Van Den Berg, and T. M. Van Lint, eds., Redefining Christian Identity. Cultural Interaction in the Middle East since the Rise of Islam (Peeters, 2005); and ‘For Whom Does the Writer Write?: The first Bubonic Plague Pandemic According to Syriac sources’ in L. Little, ed., Plague and the End of Antiquity. The Pandemic of 541–750 (Cambridge, 2007). He has taught in the History Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, since 1974. He holds a BA in Near Eastern Languages from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in Islamic Studies and a PhD in History from the University of California, Los Angeles.