Professor Michael Lower (1971-2025): In Memoriam

The Department of History at the University of Minnesota sadly shares the news of Professor Michael Lower’s passing. A native of Canada, Michael completed his undergraduate study at the University of Toronto and then earned his PhD at Cambridge University. He joined the Department of History in 2000 and for 25 years has been collegial and service-oriented, serving a term as Associate Chair as well as on numerous committees within the Department and College. 

He was a distinguished historian of medieval Europe and the Islamic Mediterranean. His innovative first book, The Baron’s Crusade: A Call to Arms and Its Consequences (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), reveals that Pope Gregory IX’s call for holy war to unify Christianity instead exposed the diversity of Christian identity. For his second book, Michael wanted to bridge the traditional divide between European history and the impact of crusades in Islamic history. In 2010 he was awarded a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship that allowed him to study classical Arabic and medieval Islamic history at the University of Chicago, gaining a broad understanding of the sources and historiography on the Almohads and Hafsides in the Western Mediterranean, and the Mamluks and their confrontation with the Mongols in the Middle East. The Tunis Crusade of 1270: A Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2018) offers an exciting new approach to the late Crusades, one that bridges the disciplinary divide between European history and Middle Eastern and North African Studies. 

Colleague Daniel Schroeter praises The Tunis Crusade as  “a riveting history of events and political players” that reveals “a complex web of political, diplomatic and commercial ties” across the Mediterranean. In this book and a series of articles, Michael offers a paradigm which he refers to as the “Mediterranean paradox.” Conflict and violence defined difference between religious communities but paradoxically, he argued, the maintenance of distinctive religious identities is also what enabled cooperation and even stability across religious boundaries.

More recently, his scholarship took another new direction as he began working on a project about Hakoah Vienna, a Jewish soccer club founded in Vienna in 1909 and caught up in the turbulent decades before World War II. He was passionate about this inspiring story of Jewish athletes who, in his words, “beat the English at their own game and defied the Nazis.”

The Hakoah Vienna project grew out of a wildly popular course that Michael developed to explore global history through “the beautiful game.” This synergy between his scholarship and teaching was also characteristic of his Medieval courses. “My research explores how medieval people from across the Mediterranean world confronted many kinds of diversity;” he wrote, “my classes make constructive engagement with difference the central project for every student who enrolls.” Based on student nominations he won the Horace T. Morse-University of Minnesota Alumni Association Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education. On that occasion, one of his former students remarked: “He possesses qualities I value most in an advisor–compassion, enthusiasm, and a world view that is truly open-minded and accepting.”  Michael also received the Advising and Mentoring Award from the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly. He was advisor to ten PhD students, including a cohort who followed his example of learning Arabic as well as European languages so that they could research the multi-faith societies of the Middle Ages. David Perry, who now serves as the department’s associate director of undergraduate studies and has published several books on Medieval history, was Michael’s first graduate advisee. David recalled Michael’s supportive manner of providing feedback on drafts: “He would re-pitch my work to me, showing me where I was undermining myself and my claims, where I could do more, how my scholarship mattered.”  

His care and commitment to graduate students extended to many for whom he was not the official advisor, including three in the past year as he was being treated for cancer. Colleague Andrea Sterk noted that he participated in their oral exams “because he was truly interested in the intellectual projects of these students–Christians and Muslims in Palestine after the Arab conquests, the career of a tenth-century patriarch of Constantinople, or trade and religion along the Silk Road–and he raised incisive questions and offered critical advice and insights that will continue to shape the work of these young scholars as they publish books and articles from their dissertations in the coming years.”

Michael also served as a model teacher for graduate students. Ann Zimo (PhD 2016), whose dissertation analyzed Muslims in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, benefited from his mentorship on both scholarship and pedagogy. She was a TA in her first semester in the program and recalled that Michael told them to “bring all your energy to the large lecture class.” And then he practiced what he preached: “I have the distinct memory of him running entirely around the hall, in his suit, from the upper left, down to the podium and then around and back up the right side to be able to engage the students in a Q and A. It was amazing!”

He carried that spirit into his final semester of teaching in fall 2024 when he taught Global History through Soccer. He divided students into research teams, as he did for all his classes, named this time for famous soccer clubs. “The randomness of the groupings is important,” Michael explained, “because it forces students to figure out a way of working with total strangers who may not share their major, place of origin, or even first language.” Every day he wore a different soccer jersey to class. “He showed up and taught with all his heart until the very end of the semester,” TA Erin Ostlund recounts. “When he announced that he would be stepping down from teaching for the rest of the term, the students gave him a standing ovation and many students went up to shake his hand to thank him, wish him well, and even share their own battles with cancer with him.”

Tributes have come in from around the world as well as close to home. Dominique Valérian, Chair of Mediterranean History at the Sorbonne University, wrote when he learned “with great sadness” of Michael’s passing that he “greatly appreciated his work and his always positive and enthusiastic character.” As Kay Reyerson, his colleague in medieval history, remarked, “We will miss his wisdom, compassion, charisma, humor, and especially his courage.”

Whether at work or in other aspects of his life, Michael modeled decency, respect, and care for people near and far. He was a devoted husband to Lianna Farber (professor of English) and loving father to Isaac and Moses. He will be sorely missed and fondly remembered by the many whose lives he touched.