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Standing Faculty

Jessica Goldberg

Assistant Professor of History

Jessica GoldbergJessica Goldberg is an Associate Professor of Medieval History. She studies and teaches the history of the Mediterranean basin, Christian Europe, and the Islamic world, specializing in economic and legal institutions and cultures. She joined the Penn faculty in the fall of 2006 after completing her Ph.D. in History at Columbia University. She also holds an MA in education from the Bankstreet School of Education, and was a math teacher at Stuyvesant High School for several years before returning to graduate work in history. Professor Goldberg has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, a post-doctoral fellow in the Stanford Humanities Fellows Program, and a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a 2012 Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies.

Research

Professor Goldberg’s research is located largely in the Islamic and Italian eastern Mediterranean of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. She studies both comparative and intersecting developments in the history of merchants—their roles in their respective societies and their roles in the Mediterranean economy. These interests have led to a variety of related topics of study: analysis of the practical minutiae of how business, manufacturing, and trade worked; studies of ideas and practices of both religious and secular law; examination of merchants’ ideas of region, regional identity and market spaces; and explorations of the rhetorics and norms that govern non-literary medieval writing. Her first book, Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: the Geniza Merchants and their Business World (Cambridge University Press, 2012) analyzes the structure and geography of the medieval Islamic commercial economy by looking at the ways a group of eleventh-century merchants engaged with local and long-distance infrastructures and institutions of trade. In it, she also examines how notions of identity—religious, political, and geographic—affected the practices of business. Professor Goldberg’s current research on the twelfth-century Mediterranean compares two merchant communities: the circle of Jewish merchants who left their papers in the Cairo Geniza, and the merchant of Genoa. This new work examines how geographies of trade shifted as Italians expanded their market participation in the Mediterranean, and the ideas of places and markets that underpinned merchants’ choices. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Mellon Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania University Research Fund, and the American Council of Learned Societies, among others.

Teaching

Professor Goldberg teaches a variety of courses in the medieval history of the Mediterranean and Europe. She also teaches pre-modern world economic history, comparative courses in European and Islamic conceptions of holy war (both medieval and modern), Mediterranean historiography, and Judeo-Arabic. Her use of medieval manuscripts in teaching was featured in a cover article of the New York Times “Education Life.” In 2009, she won the Charles Ludwig Distinguished Teaching Award from the School of Arts and Sciences of the University of Pennsylvania.

Select publications

Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: the Geniza Merchants and their Busines World (Cambridge University Press, Studies in Economic History, May 2012, in press).

“Choosing and Enforcing Business relationships in the Eleventh-century Mediterranean: re-examining the ‘Maghribī traders’,” Past & Present, forthcoming

“The Use and Abuse of the Geniza Mercantile Letter,” Journal of Medieval History, June 2012 (in press)

“Back-biting and Self-promotion: the Work of Merchants of the Cairo Geniza” in History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and Matter of the Person Fulton and Holsinger, eds. Columbia University Press, 2007, 117-127.

“The Legal Persona of the Child in Gratian’s Decretum,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 24 (2000) 10-53.

Courses Taught (As Schedule Allows)

For current course listings, consult the Course Directory.

Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean