Alison Vacca
Gevork M. Avedissian Associate Professor of Armenian History and Civilization
Alison Vacca is a historian of early Islam working on the caliphal provinces Armenia and Caucasian Albania. According to ʿAbbasid-era Arabic geographies, Armenia included what is now the modern Republic of Armenia and eastern Turkey. The neighboring Caucasian Albania (Arrān) stretched over the modern Republic of Azerbaijan and eastern Georgia. Her work centers on several themes, including intercultural transmission of historical texts, quick-changing alliances in moments of intercommunal violence, and intermarriage across ethnic and religious lines.
Vacca’s first monograph, Non-Muslim Provinces under early Islam: Islamic Rule and Iranian Legitimacy in Armenia and Caucasian Albania, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017 and received the 2018 prize from the Central Eurasian Studies Society. In this book, she relies on Armenian and Arabic sources to investigate the regional memories of the pre-Islamic Sasanian past as a way to discuss the role of Iranian traditions in narrating caliphal history. She also published An Armenian Futūḥ Narrative: Łewond’s Eighth-Century History of the Caliphate, co-authored with Sergio La Porta, through the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago. It received the 2025 prize for Best Edition and Translation from the Mediterranean Studies Seminar. She is currently completing a book that develops an acentric and collagic model of medieval history, which she demonstrates with the example of marriage and matriliny related to the Khazar Khaganate.