DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interests

Geographic Field(s):  Asian History; Global History; Middle Eastern and North African History; Medieval and Early Modern European History

Thematic Field(s):  Religious History; War and Empire in History

Principal Research Interest(s):  Mongol Empire, Central Asia, Iran, Comparative Empires, History of Religions and Conversion

Biography

Jonathan Brack is a historian of medieval and early modern Iran and the Mongol Empire. His research focuses on religious and scientific exchanges, conversion, and comparative empires. His first book is An Afterlife for the Khan: Muslims, Buddhists, and Sacred Kingship in Mongol Iran and Eurasia (University of California Press, 2023). The book was finalist for the American Academy of Religion Best First Book in the History of Religions.

He coedited the volume Along the Silk Roads in Mongol Eurasia: Generals, Merchants, and Intellectuals (University of California Press, 2020), and a special issue in the journal Mamlūk Studies Review (Mamluks and Mongols: Studies in Honor of Reuven Amitai, 2024).

His new book project is titled Ever Closer Encounters: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Mongols’ Middle East. Based on sources in Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, Judeo-Persian, and Syriac, Ever Closer Encounters investigates the intricate interplay between Muslims, Jews, and Christians, exploring how Mongol domination impacted both patterns of religious and communal distinction, and intellectual cross-fertilization and social embeddedness between religious communities in the eastern Islamic world (Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan and Anatolia).

Another recent project explores medical exchanges between East Asia and the Middle East under Mongol rule. His article in the forthcoming edited volume Cultural Brokerage in Premodern Islamic Societies (expected 2026) examines how Muslim physicians, trained in the Galenic medical system, made sense of Chinese medical theory and practices.

Brack’s research on medieval medical exchanges has also drawn him into the scholarly debate on the origins of plague (the Black Death), one of the deadliest pandemics in human history. An article he co-authored in Medical History scrutinized the textual evidence for the recent claim that the Mongol invasions disseminated plague across Asia into the Middle East and Europe as early as the middle of the thirteenth century, which is a century earlier than the commonly accepted date for the beginning of the Black Death pandemic. The article argues that the evidence for plague outbreak in connection with the Mongol invasions has been misconstrued, and that there are no substantial textual indications of a mid-thirteenth-century outbreak of plague in the Middle East.

At Northwestern, Brack teaches courses on Nomads in world history, the Mongols, medieval Islamic history, Jewish-Muslim relations, and comparative empires.

Publications

• An Afterlife for the Khan: Muslims, Buddhists, and Sacred Kingship in Mongol Iran and Eurasia. University of California Press, 2023.
• Jonathan Brack, Michal Biran and Francesca Fiaschetti, eds. Along the Silk Roads in Mongol Eurasia: Generals, Merchants, and Intellectuals. University of California Press, 2020.

Articles

• “Ibn Kammūna Is Going to Hell! Muslim-Jewish Polemics at the Ilkhanid Court,” Mamlūk Studies Review, XXVII (Mamluks and Mongols: Studies in Honor of Reuven Amitai, 2024), 183-203.
• Jonathan Brack, Reuven Amitai, and Michal Biran. 2024. “Plague and the Mongol Conquest of Baghdad (1258)? A Reevaluation of the Sources,” Medical History (First View), 1-19.  
•  “Chinggisid Pluralism and Religious Competition: Buddhists, Muslims, and the Question of Violence and Sovereignty in Ilkhanid Iran,” Modern Asian Studies, 56 (2022): 815-39.
•  “Disenchanting Heaven: Interfaith Debate, Sacral Kingship, and Conversion to Islam in the Mongol Empire, 1260-1335,” Past & Present, 250 (2021): 11-53.   
•  “A Mongol Mahdi in Medieval Anatolia: Reform, Rebellion, and Divine Right in the Post-Mongol Islamic World,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 139(3) (2019): 611-29.  
•  “Theologies of Auspicious Kingship: The Islamization of Chinggisid Sacral Kingship in the Islamic world,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 60(4) (2018): 1143-71.