Jo Van Steenbergen teaches Islamic history at Ghent University, Belgium. He has published extensively on medieval Islamic history, including Order Out of Chaos (2006), Caliphate and Kingship in a Fifteenth-Century Literary History (2016), and Trajectories of State Formation across Fifteenth-Century Islamic West-Asia (2020).

Wave 1: 7th-10th Centuries - Late Antiquity and Arabo-Islamic Imperial Formation 1. West-Asia in Late Antiquity: Roman, Persian, and Arabian Leaderships (6th-7th centuries) 2. The Prophet Muhammad and the Arabian Leadership of Medina (610-661) 3. The Arabian Imperial Formation of the Umayyads (661-750) 4. Arabian Expansions and Late Antique Transformations (7th-8th centuries) 5. The 'Classical' Period of the Abbasids: Late Antique Imperial Formation and the Triumph of the East (750-908) 6. Late Antique Patrimonial-Bureaucratic Formation in Islamic West-Asia: the construction of Arabo-Islamic urbanities, authorities and courts (8th-10th centuries) 7. Abbasid Imperial Transformations and Post-Abbasid Fragmentation (9th-11th centuries) Wave 2: 11th-18th Centuries - Middle Period, Early Modernity, and Turkish, Mongol, Turko-Mongol and Turkmen Dynastic Formations 8. 'Medieval' Transformations across Islamic West-Asia: the Turkish Dynasty of the Seljuks, and Networks of Perso-Iranian viziers (1038-1193) 9. 'Medieval' Transformations in West-Asia's Euphrates-to-Nile zone - 1: 'Franks', Zengids and Ayyyubids 10. 'Medieval' Transformations in West-Asia's Nile-to-Euphrates zone - 2: the Cairo Sultanate and 'the Reign of the Turks' (1250-15th century) 11. 'Medieval' Transformations between Transoxania and Asia Minor - 1: Mongol and post-Mongol Conquest Practices and Hülegüid, post-Hülegüid and Ottoman Dynastic Formations 12. 'Medieval' Transformations between Transoxania and Asia Minor - 2: Turko-Mongol and Turkmen Conquest Practices and Dynastic Formations 13. 'Medieval' Symbiotic Transformations in Islamic West-Asia: the Construction of Heterogeneous Urbanities, Ambiguous Authorities, and Dynastic Courts (12th -16th Centuries) 14. Early Modern Dynastic Formations: (Post-)Safavids, Ottomans and Many Others (17th-18th Centuries)