Faculty Spotlight: Elaine van Dalen

Spotlight On - Elaine van Dalen: Medical Perspectives on Epidemics in the Classical Islamic World

Elaine van Dalen is assistant professor of Classical Islamic Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She is a philologist working on medical, botanical, and agricultural texts from the Classical Islamic world. Her research questions relate to the history of medicine and philology, the transmission and translation of knowledge, and practices of medical commentary. She teaches Columbia’s Contemporary Civilization course, and MESAAS’ core course Asian Humanities.

Her most recent publication “Pediatrics in Medieval Islamic Theoria” (JAOS) analyzes the pediatric material in the Arabic commentaries (written tenth–fifteenth centuries) on the Hippocratic Aphorisms by exploring the traces of its late-antique origins and highlighting the influences of contemporary Islamic sources.