Aga Khan Program Fall 2026: An Evening With Lecture Series: Valentina Grasso
Building 3, 33 MASSACHUSETTS AVE, Cambridge, MA
Aga Khan Program Fall 2026 An Evening With Lecture Series Monday September 21st 6 pm in MIT Room 3-133 Free and open to the public A Red Sea Pan-Culture from Almaqah to Allah: Pagan Temples, Christian Churches, and the Great Mosque of Sana’a Valentina Grasso Bio Valentina is Assistant Professor of Medieval History at Bard College. She previously taught at The Catholic University of America in the Department of Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literatures and at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. She was also an affiliate member of the European Research Council (ERC) project “The Qur’an as a Source for Late Antiquity”, and participated in archaeological projects in Iraqi Kurdistan, Sicily, Ethiopia, and Jordan.Her doctoral dissertation at the University of Cambridge was published as a monograph, Pre-Islamic Arabia: Societies, Politics, Cults, and Identities during Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Her work on the Red Sea, Central Asia and Sicily in the ancient and medieval period has been featured in The Journal of Near Eastern Studies, The Journal of Late Antiquity, Millennium, The Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History and The…