“I was an odd choice for a Rome Prize, or so I have always thought: the texts I study are not in Latin or Greek but in Hebrew and Arabic. I came to Rome to study the survival of Judaeo-Arabic in medieval Sicily. I ended up studying the history of the archive in medieval Egypt. I blame my change of heart on the Theater of Marcellus, the building that taught me why the afterlives of artifacts matter.” Marina Rustow.

Marina Rustow (2007 Fellow) is the Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and associate professor in the History Department. Her current research focuses on social history and production, use, and storage of documentary texts in the medieval middle East. Her book Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Cornell University Press, 2008) won two Jewish studies book prizes.

The Home from Rome series is made possible by the new New Initiatives for Don Fund, a gift of Maria R. Cox.