Noemie Lucas
Research Fellow in Abbasid Fiscal History and Historiography

- ERC Project CALIPHAL FINANCES - The Finance of the Caliphate: Abbasid Fiscal practice in Islamic Late Antiquity (2021-2026)
- Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies
- School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
Contact details
- Email: noemie.lucas@ed.ac.uk
Address
- Street
-
Room 1/24
19 George Square - City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9LD
Background
After a Master degree in History of the Islamic World (Pantheon-Sorbonne University, 2013) and a BA in Arabic (INALCO, 2017), Dr. Lucas received her PhD in History from Pantheon-Sorbonne University in December 2020.
Her PhD Dissertation (“The power of the land: An Attempt at a Social History of Lower-Iraq during the 8th century”) dealt with the history of the formation of Islamic State from the vantage point of Iraq. It demonstrates that studying the early Islamic elite’s approach to “land” allows writing another type of the political history of the Early Islamic Empire that emphasizes how the Islamic State was the product of negotiations.
Before coming to Edinburgh and joining the ERC project Caliphal Finances: The Finances of the Caliphate: Abbasid Practice in Islamic Late Antiquity in September 2021, she was a postdoctoral researcher in digital philology of texts in Arabic scripts at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) in Paris (2020-2021).
Research summary
Dr Lucas’s research interests comprise early Islamic history, especially administrative, political and fiscal history, early Islamic historiography and the broader question of the writing of history, history of the Umayyad and Abbasid States, fiscal literature. Her interests also include Digital humanities, especially Digital philology of Arabic texts (HTR/OCR, Digital edition, etc..)
Places: Iraq, Lower-Iraq, Egypt, Near East
Themes: Historiography, Transmission and Composition, Umayyad and early Abbasid history, Fiscal history and historiography, Landownership, Administration, Digital Humanities, Arabic manuscripts, HTR/OCR
Period: Late Antiquity, Medieval period