Meet Our New Professor of Early Islam, Dr. Antonio Musto

We are unbelievably excited to announce that in the fall, Dr. Antonio Musto will join our program as Assistant Professor of Early Islam. You can read more about Dr. Musto below, but he will contribute immensely to the program with incredible scholarship, innovative teaching, and exciting ideas. Welcome, Dr. Musto!

Antonio Musto is a scholar of Islamic social and intellectual history from the rise of Islam to roughly 1300. He received his Ph.D. from the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies department at New York University, focusing on the emergence of Sufism from the 9th to 12th centuries. Antonio’s current book project examines the impact of 19th and 20th century Orientalist approaches to "mysticism" on the historiography of Sufism's formative period and draws attention to previously unstudied Sufi communities and texts. He engages with questions of genre, canonization, community formation, and the construction of religious authority to provide new ways of approaching the history of early Sufism. Antonio's research treats other topics in the study of Sufism, early Islamic theology, new manuscript finds, hagiography, and social history. He is also interested in questions of religiosity in early Islam within the context of Late Antiquity, with attention to the relationship between early Islamic renunciation and late antique Christian mysticism and asceticism. Antonio also develops digital humanities projects that bridge the gap between the non-technical user and cutting-edge developments in the fields of Arabic natural language processing and digital corpora.