Dr. Brian Catlos was awarded a 2017 Award for Excellence in Leadership and Service by the Boulder Faculty Association for his work on Mediterranean Studies and the CU Mediterranean Studies Group at CU Boulder. This award honors excellence in teaching, service, and research to nominated CU Boulder faculty members. Congratulations, Dr. Catlos, on this well-deserved recognition!
Additionally, Dr. Catlos has been invited to give the Fifth Annual Boyce Gray Lecture at Northwestern University on April 26, 2017. Sponsored by the History Department and the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies, the lecture series honors the achievements of Professor Gray Boyce, a medieval historian who served as chairman of the Department of History from 1948 to 1966. Dr. Catlos’s talk is titled, “Foreigners in their Own Lands: The Muslims of Medieval Europe.”
On March 14, 2017, Dr. Catlos was invited to speak at the University Womens’ Club Luncheon Lecture. His talk was titled "From Bob Dylan to Bill Gates: What Does Islam Have to do with Modern Western Culture?" In this lecture, Dr. Catlos provided his historical perspective on nationalism and its application to our current national and international political climate with regard to the Middle East and Islam. He discussed how Islam has affected Western culture including rock and roll, the game of chess, and the digital revolution. Dr. Catlos also addressed how medieval Spain and the Mediterranean world occupy a crucial place in the evolution of what we call “the West,” and why scholars are reconfiguring deeply rooted notions of where and how western culture originated and developed.
Dr. Brian Catlos is a Professor of Religious Studies at CU Boulder and is one of the world’s leading figures in the study of Mediterranean history. His work centers on Muslim-Christian-Jewish relations and ethno-religious identity in medieval Europe and the Islamic World. In 2014, he published Infidel Kings and Unholy Warriors: Faith, Power and Violence in the Age of Crusade and Jihad, as well as Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, which won the Albert Hourani Book Prize, the most important award in the field of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies.