Hannah Barker is an associate professor of history at Arizona State University. Her research centers on connections between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea in the late medieval period, especially the trade in slaves which flourished during the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. Her first book, dealing with the processes of shipping, marketing, and purchasing slaves and the Genoese, Mamluk, and Venetian merchants who conducted this trade, is That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500. It was awarded the Paul E. Lovejoy Prize by the Journal of Global Slavery, the ASU Institute for Humanities Research book prize, and honorable mentions for the Middle East Medievalists Book Prize and the Mediterranean Seminar’s Wadjih F. al-Hamwi Prize for the best first book in Mediterranean studies. Her current interests include changes in status (enslavement and manumission); the role of physicians in slave markets; how medieval Italian notaries described slaves and voiced their statements in legal acts; Mamluk ethnographic comparisons between northern and southern barbarians; and local slaving patterns in the Black Sea.
Prof. Barker is on sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2024-2025.
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