Jack Tannous

I am originally from Houston, Texas and studied Arabic, Philosophy, History, and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin for my undergraduate degree.  I did an MPhil at Oxford in Eastern Christian Studies and then my PhD in History at Princeton.  I have been at Dumbarton Oaks since August 2010 as the Post-Doctoral Teaching fellow in Byzantine History and have, since then, taught one course each semester in the History Department at George Washington University as part of my fellowship.  I am interested in the cultural history of the eastern Mediterranean, especially the Middle East, in the Late Antique and early medieval period.  My research focuses on the Syriac-speaking Christian communities of the Near East in this period, but I am interested in a number of other, related areas, including Greco-Syriac and Greco-Arabic translation, Christian-Muslim interactions, sectarianism and identity, early Islamic history, and Aramaic dialectology.  I am also interested in the editing of Syriac and Arabic (especially Christian Arabic) texts.