Reuven Amitai is Eliyahu Elath Professor for Muslim History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and currently Dean of the Faculty of Humanities there (from 1 September 2010).  He studies and teaches the history of the pre-modern Islamic world, specializing in the following fields: the coming of the Turks and Mongols to the Middle East, Muslim responses to the Crusades, the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria, the Ilkhanate (the Mongol state in the Middle East), medieval Palestine, the military history of the pre-modern Muslim world, and conversion to Islam.

Born in Philadelphia, USA, in 1955, Reuven Amitai immigrated to Israel in 1976.  He studied for his B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, his M.A. and Ph.D. (1990) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and was a visiting post-graduate student at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of London, in 1985-86.  He has been a visiting fellow at Princeton University (1990-91) and St. Antony’s College (1996-97) in Oxford, and has also been a visiting researcher at the Central Asian Seminar of the University of Bonn (2004), and a Professeur invité at the l’Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Section des Sciences Religieuses, at the Sorbonne in Paris (2007).