Dr Anna Chrysostomides is a historian of late Antiquity and early Islam in the eastern Mediterranean and the territories beyond towards Iran with a focus on Christian-Muslim relations. She is a Lecturer in Theology at Trinity College, University of Oxford, and teaches Islamic History at Queen Mary, University of London, where she also established the Islamic World Community for students of all levels interested in the history of the Islamic World broadly defined.
Anna’s primary research interests cover the social dynamics of conversion between Christianity and Islam from the 8th through the 10th centuries CE, as well as shared practices and beliefs between these two faiths. She is particularly interested in people who vacillated between Christianity and Islam, and social situations which would have engendered people identifying with both religions, such as inter-religious marriages, children of those unions, Christian mawālī of Muslims, and Christian slaves of Muslims.
She received her DPhil from the Faculty of Theology and Religion at University of Oxford, studying under the supervision of Prof. Robert Hoyland, Prof. David Taylor and Rev. Dr. Jane Baun, for her research on the relationship between inter-religious families and conversion between Christianity and Islam in the early medieval Near East, and MPhil from the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford.