Robert G. Hoyland

Robert G. Hoyland ( b. 1966 ) is a historian.

Hoyland studied at Oxford University and was awarded his doctorate in 1994. He specializes in the history of the Near East in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, with an emphasis on the history of early Islam. He has taught at the University of St. Andrews and Oxford, before he accepted a professorship at the University of New York. He currently teaches as a professor of Late Antique and Early Islamic Middle Eastern History.

Hoyland is an expert in the history of late antiquity in the Near East and the transition to the early Islamic period. It deals inter alia with the mutual relations between Christians, Jews and Muslims as well as the transfer of knowledge from the ancient to the early Islamic world. His published work in 1997 Seeing Islam as others saw it is now regarded as a standard work, have been setting out all relevant non-Islamic sources for early Islamic period and summarize and analyze. In 2011 he presented a comprehensive investigation to the lost historical work of Theophilus of Edessa, including an English translation of the possible fragments.

Publications

(Selection)

• Seeing Islam as others saw it. A survey and analysis of the Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian writings on Islam. Princeton 1997.
• Arabia and the Arabs from the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam. London / New York 2001.
• Muslims and Others in early Islamic society. Aldershot 2004 ( as a publisher).
• Islamic Reflections and Musings Arabic. Oxford 2004 ( ed. with Philip Kennedy).
• From Hellenism to Islam: Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East. Cambridge / New York, 2009 (ed., together with Hannah M. Cotton, Jonathan J. Price and David J. Wasserstein ).
• Theophilus of Edessa 's Chronicle and the Circulation of Historical Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (Translated Texts for Historians, 57). Liverpool 2011.