Over the last forty years the understanding of the Mongols in world history has been transformed. Rather than being seen as a mindless horde leaving only death and destruction in their wake this new interpretation proposes that the pax mongolica promoted free trade and an exchange of ideas that created the early modern world. More recently, however, this historiographical restoration has begun to be challenged. The aim of Johan Elverskog’s project while at SCAS, “The Fathers and Sons of Chinggis Khan: A History of the Mongols”, is to continue this re-evaluation by shifting the historiographical framing both temporally and spatially. Since only by shifting the focus in this way will a truly comprehensive and synthetic history of the Mongols – and their role in shaping Eurasian history for more than a thousand years – be achieved.

Johan Elverskog will be a Fellow at SCAS during the academic year 2025–26. He was formerly a Fellow at SCAS in 2007–08.

During her time at SCAS, Dana Katz will work on the book project “Rome beyond Rome: The Reception of Classical Antiquity in the Islamic and Christian Medieval Western Mediterranean” that explores conceptions of the classical past in the medieval Western Mediterranean, specifically how its Christian, Muslim, as well as Jewish inhabitants perceived its material remains. They interpreted the imperial past, which to them was largely pagan, according to the ontological paradigms of their faiths. Formerly core areas of the Roman Empire, Southern Italy, Spain, and North Africa contained many ruins, standing sculpture, and re-purposed ancient objects. The book’s main themes are the ruined landscape, materiality through repair, pre-modern antiquarianism, and the historicity of objects. By the late Middle Ages, Muslims and Western Christians had shared centuries of interaction and contact through trade, war, and diplomacy. While earlier studies have considered them separately, the book will endeavor to uncover overlaps and connections among these sectarian groups where the ruin and the historical object are considered as loci of encounters, or meeting points, between different cultures and religions.

Dana Katz will be a Fellow at SCAS during the academic year 2025–26.

While at SCAS as a SCAS-Nordic Fellow during the Fall of 2025, Niklas Olsen will work on a book project that aims to explore the techno-economic reasoning that dictates current climate politics. Viewing this techno-economic reasoning as a new form of promethean environmental discourse, the project proposes to historicize, contextualize, and criticize the discourse through six biographically focused studies of the so-called “promethean minds”, who have contributed to invent and promote prometheanism since the 1980s.