Jessica Goldberg

Biography

Jessica Goldberg studies the medieval history of the Mediterranean basin, Christian Europe, and the Islamic world, specializing in economic and legal institutions and culture.

After earning an A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard University, Professor Goldberg spent several years teaching high school math, then completed a Ph.D. in the History Department at Columbia University in 2006. Before joining the UCLA faculty in 2013, Professor Goldberg taught at Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Goldberg studies the medieval history of the Mediterranean basin, Latin Christendom, and the western Islamic world, specializing in economic and legal history.  The main focus of her work is on the infrastructures, institutions, and cultures that govern material life, and the re-construction of  geographic and socio-economic patterns of production and consumption. Additional interests include epistolographic culture, and the idea and practice of law in medieval societies. Her first book, Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Geniza Merchants and their Business World (Cambridge University Press, Studies in Economic History, 2012) explores the nature and geography of the medieval Islamic economy, the ways a group of merchants engaged with local and long-distance infrastructures and institutions of trade, and how notions of identity—religious, political, and geographic—affected the practices of business. Professor Goldberg has also written articles on the nature and use of merchant letters, on the economic activities of Jews under Islam, on the use of law, contracts, and evidence among medieval merchants in both Italy and Egypt, and on the legal persona of children in medieval canon law.

Professor Goldberg’s current work explores the nature of economic change between late antiquity and the middle Islamic period in North Africa and the Levant, especially focusing on changes in economic materiality that shifted patterns of production, transport, and consumption.  This project centers around looking at new patterns of production and use of key products in these centuries in comparison to Late Antiquity, particularly in the textile and ceramic fields. Professor Goldberg is using a mixture of written sources, archeological research, and museum collections to research both the cultural norms that drove new kinds of production, investment, and technological innovation in the western Islamic ecumene, and in turn the material bases that allowed such cultural patterns to become elaborated. It is thus an attempt to reveal and document the profound re-shaping of material culture that was part of the first centuries of Islamic rule in the Mediterranean (c. 700-1100).

Professor Goldberg teaches a broad range of subject matter, including courses on medieval European history, Mediterranean economic history from antiquity through the end of the middle ages, the Jews in the medieval Islamic world, and history of Mediterranean religions. She advises graduate students in both medieval European and medieval Islamic history.