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Marina Rustow, Historian | MacArthur Fellows Program

In this interview, 2015 MacArthur Fellow Marina Rustow explains how her work as a historian lead her to revisit existing narratives of religious intolerance in the medieval Middle East. Rustow’s work examines thousands of legal and literary documents deposited in Cairo’s Ben Ezra Synagogue over a thousand years ago. Rustow’s approach to this archive goes beyond decoding documents, to questioning the relationship between subjects and medieval states and asking what that relationship tells us about power and the negotiation of religious boundaries. This resource is part of the MacArthur Fellows Program Collection.