Dr. Ahmed Mohamed M.Abdelkawy Sheir

Biography

Ahmed Sheir is a Postdoc Research Fellow in the pre-modern sociocultural history of the Mediterranean and the Middle East in the ERC-funded Project "Arabic Poetry in the Cairo Genizah", Department of Near and Middle Eastern Studies, School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies. He is also an affiliated Fellow at the Islamic Studies Department, CNMS, University of Marburg, Germany. Ahmed studied history at Alexandria University, Egypt. In 2014, He graduated with a master's degree in medieval history with joint supervision between Georg-August University of Göttingen (Germany) and Damanhour University (Egypt). He then completed a PhD in History, funded by the Jameel Scholarship Fund Program, at the Philipps-University of Marburg, Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies (CNMS), Germany, in 2021. His dissertation focused on historicising the Crusading-Muslim Encounter through the Prester John Legend and its Eastern-Latin Entanglements during the 12th and 13th centuries. After completing his dissertation, he held a postdoctoral fellowship from the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung at CNMS Philipps-University of Marburg in 2021. Before joining TCD, he also taught courses and seminars on the history of the crusades, medieval Islamic-Christian relations, Islamic history, the Mongols and European-Islamic relations, and Gulf history, among other subjects. Ahmed's research interests include; 1) sociocultural history through myth, literature and folklore; 2) pre-modern Jewish-Christian-Muslim interrelationships across the Mediterranean and the Middle East through the Geniza documents; 3) history, historiography and memory of the crusades and Islamic Jihad in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.