Yaron Ayalon is the Schusterman Teaching fellow in Judaic and Middle Eastern Studies. He teaches in the School of International and Area Studies and the Program in Judaic and Israel Studies. His research focuses on the history of the Middle East in the early modern period, and particularly on non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire. His recent work deals with Jewish communities in Ottoman Syria and how they confronted natural disasters.

Ayalon earned a BA in education and Middle East history from Tel Aviv University in 2002, and a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2009.
 
His publications include:
 
 “Revisiting Taha Husayn’s Fi al-Shi‘r al-Jahili and Its Sequel,” Die Welt des Islams 49: 1 (2009), 98-121 – a study of two works of the Egyptian writer Taha Husayn.
 
“Famines, Earthquakes, Plagues: Natural Disasters in Ottoman Syria in the Writings of Visitors,” Journal of Ottoman Studies 32 (2008), 203-27 – a study of how foreign visitors to the Ottoman Empire described natural disasters
 
and “Richelieu in Arabic: The Catholic Printed Message to the Orient in the Seventeenth Century,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 19: 2 (2008), 151-65 – a study of the venture of printing Arabic books in seventeenth-century Europe
 
Ayalon is an associate editor for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World (Brill, 2010), and the author of several entries.