Research
My research integrates three primary fields of study: the history of the medieval Middle East, Jewish Studies, and premodern global history.
Books
Craig Pery Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History. Princeton University Press, 2026.
In this book, Craig Perry mines a remarkable cache of fragmentary documents preserved in an Egyptian synagogue to write a new history of slavery and the slave trade in the medieval Middle East. These documents—which range from the everyday correspondence of traveling merchants to legal queries sent to Jewish jurists—provide the richest surviving archive for the social history of slavery during the centuries when Cairo was an imperial and commercial capital at the intersection of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. Perry draws on this archive, known as the Cairo Geniza, to shed new light on such crucial topics as the slave trade in state diplomacy, the entanglements of gender and household slavery, and the lives of the enslaved.
Craig Perry et al., eds. The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2, AD 500–AD 1420. Cambridge University Press, 2021.
This volume demonstrates the continual and central presence of slavery in societies worldwide between 500 CE and 1420 CE. The essays analyze key concepts in the history of slavery, including gender, trade, empire, state formation and diplomacy, labor, childhood, social status and mobility, cultural attitudes, spectrums of dependency and coercion, and life histories of enslaved people.
Select Published Articles and Book Chapters
"Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Western Indian Ocean World"
The first comprehensive study of slavery and the slave trade in the Western Indian Ocean, examining the intersection of African, Arab, and South Asian involvement in the region's complex web of commercial and cultural exchange.
"L’expansion de l’Islam et l’esclavage (The Expansion of Islam and Slavery)"
An examination of the relationship between Islamic expansion and the practice of slavery, focusing on the ways in which religious and cultural factors influenced the treatment and status of enslaved individuals.
"Historicizing Slavery in the Medieval Islamic World
This essay argues that slavery in the medieval Islamic World has not been historicized because scholars have largely ignored or underused the documentary sources that abound and that illustrate the practice of slavery and the slave trade in every day life.
Works-in-Progress
“Slavery, Abyssinian Diaspora, and the Civilian Elite of Medieval Mecca”
This article examines the role of enslaved Abyssinian women and their children in the households of elite Muslim society in Mecca during the 15th century.
"The Cairo Geniza, Medieval Africa, and the Contingent History of Blackness"
This chapter analyzes the everyday writings of Egyptian Jews to explore how Islamic North Africa was connected to northeast and East Africa, as well as how Jews spoke and wrote about Black people during the 11th and 12th centuries.