Jun.-Prof. Dr. Theresa Jäckh

• Mediterranean city history
• interreligious communication 
• trans-Mediterranean contacts
• legal culture and legal practice in multi-religious societies
• water and landscapes, especially Sicily

Legal Cultures (second book, ongoing): The project aims to examine communication and decision-making processes in which people of different religious affiliations were involved. The main aim is to find out how individuals or groups in multi-religious societies navigated between different legal forums in order to seek advice or obtain their (perceived) rights, and also to enquire how the everyday problems arising from living together affected the attitude of authorities to certain legal issues.

Transmediterranean History (2019‒ongoing): In cooperation with Daniel König and Eric Böhme (both University of Konstanz), I am co-editing an annotated anthology of Arabic and Latin sources which are published as an online journal. The aim is to translate, contextualise and interpret source passages that are relevant to the history of trans-Mediterranean and interreligious contacts and to provide researchers, students, teachers and other interested parties with free access to the current state of research on these topics. The articles are published in German, English and Arabic.

Interreligious Communication (2022‒2025): This is a project funded by the UK-German Funding Initiative in the Humanities (AHRC/DFG) on "Interreligious Communication in and between the Latin-Christian and the Arabic-Islamic Sphere: Macro-theories and Micro-settings'. My part of the project is based in Durham, UK, the German partner is Daniel König (University of Konstanz). Together with two postdocs in Konstanz and Durham, we are analysing various forms of interreligious communication from a macro- and micro-historical perspective. The aim is to systematise and critically evaluate previous hypotheses on interreligious communication by analysing communication processes in terms of their specific contexts of encounter in four sub-projects.

Water and Ressource Distribution (2023‒2026): As a sub-project within the ERC Consolidator Grant "Science, Society and Environmental Change in the First Millennium CE", led by Helen Foxhall Forbes (Venice), I am working together with a PhD student to analyse how people in multi-religious societies in Muslim-ruled areas of the Mediterranean dealt with resource distribution, particularly water, during periods when environmental changes or drastic climatic events occurred.

Monograph and edited books

Raumgeschichte einer Hauptstadt: Palermo unter islamischer und christlicher Herrschaft (9.‒13. Jahrhundert) (Bibliothek des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rom), Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter 2023.

Transmediterranean History. A Commented Anthology of Primary Sources, ed. Daniel G. König, Theresa Jäckh, and Eric Böhme, Konstanz 2019‒ongoing. 

Urban Dynamics and Transcultural Communication in Medieval Sicily (Mittelmeerstudien 17), ed. Theresa Jäckh/Mona Kirsch, Paderborn: Brill Germany 2017. [Rev. by Paul Oldfield, Juli 2018, in: HSozKult: www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/rezbuecher-28373; Rev. by Andreas Obenaus, August 2019, in: HZ, 309, 1 (2019), p. 187‒189]; Rev. by Ferdinand Opll, in: Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 127 (2019), S. 470‒471; Rev. by Lioba Geis, in: DA 75, 2 (2019), S. 834‒835.

Articles

with John Aspinwall, Multiculturalism and Power Relations: Reframing Norman Sicily, in: Norman Connections. Normannische Verflechtungen zwischen Skandinavien und dem Mittelmeer, ed. Viola Skiba, Nikolas Jaspert, and Bernd Schneidmüller (Publikationen der Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen 95), Regensburg 2022, pp. 291‒309.

with Richard Engl, Islam in Medieval Sicily and Southern Italy, in: Routledge Handbook of Islam in the West, 2nd Edition, ed. Roberto Tottoli, Abingdon 2022, pp. 36‒54.

Palermo and the Norman Conquest of Sicily, in: The Normans in the Mediterranean (Medieval Identities: Socio-Cultural Spaces 9), ed. Emily A. Winkler/ Liam Fitzgerald, with assistance of Andrew Small, Turnhout: Brepols 2021, pp. 187‒209.

Verbrechen und Strafe im normannisch-staufischen Königreich Sizilien: Der Fall des Philipp von al-Mahdiyya, in: Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 76,1 (2020), pp. 23‒60.

Water and Wealth in Medieval Sicily: The Case of the Admiral’s Bridge and Arab-Norman Palermo (10th‒13th centuries), in: Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water 6, 5 (2019), pp. 1‒13, DOI: 10.1002/wat2.1363 

Place and Space in Norman Palermo, in: Urban Dynamics and Transcultural Communication in Medieval Sicily (Mittelmeerstudien 17), ed. Theresa Jäckh, and Mona Kirsch, Paderborn: Brill Germany 2017, pp. 67‒95.

with Mona Kirsch: Dynamics of Communication in Medieval Sicily. An Urban, Regional and Mediterranean Perspective, in: Urban Dynamics and Transcultural Communication in Medieval Sicily (Mittelmeerstudien 17), ed. Theresa Jäckh, and Mona Kirsch, Paderborn: Brill Germany 2017, pp. 9‒26.