Ira M. Lapidus

Ira M. Lapidus is an Emeritus Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic History at The University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of A History of Islamic Societies, and Contemporary Islamic Movements in Historical Perspective, among other works.

Biography and academic career

Lapidus was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He was born to immigrant parents, who instilled a sense of the value of education in him and his brother. He attended Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, where a history teacher helped him prepare for admissions tests and suggested he pursue Asian history studies.

Lapidus went on to college and graduate school at Harvard. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he took a course in Middle Eastern history taught by Sir Hamilton Gibb. He enjoyed the class and liked the instructor, who encouraged him to pursue social sciences in addition to history. Lapidus continued taking classes in Middle Eastern and Islamic history, and upon graduation entered a career in academia.

Lapidus was for many years Chairman of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Berkeley. He is a past president and director of the Middle East Studies Association (1984), and has served on numerous professional administrative, advisory and review committees including Visiting Committees for Georgetown and Harvard Universities, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Studies. He was a member of United States Middle East Studies delegation to People's Republic of China. He has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Urban History, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, and the Journal of Early Modern Europe.

Fellowships, honors and awards Lifetime Achievement Award, Middle East Medievalists, 2001 American Philosophical Society, elected member, 1994 Fellow, Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Study Center, 1990

His other notable fellowships include the Social Science Research Council, the Guggenheim, and Mellon Foundations, the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Hoover Institution, the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Paris), and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Director, The Urban History Association, 1990-1996 Board of Directors, Middle East Studies Association, 1972–75, 1981-85 Director, Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown, 1992-1996

Books Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages, 1967, 1984 Middle Eastern Cities, editor, 1969 Contemporary Islamic Movements in Historical Perspective, 1984 Islam, Politics and Social Movements, editor (with Edmund Burke), 1988 A History of Islamic Societies, 1988, 2002, 2014 Islamic Societies to the Nineteenth Century: A Global History, 2012