Amalia Levanoni

Amalia Levanoni was born in 1944 in Basra

Amalia Levanoni was born on 22 June 1944 in Basra, Iraq, to the Zbeida family, a merchant family from Baghdad. She was one of 7 siblings. The family immigrated to Israel in 1951, and she has lived in Haifa since 1959.

She attended the Arab Hadash high school and studied Arabic and English for her first degree at the University of Haifa. After working as a teacher, she earned a master's degree in Middle Eastern studies there. She received her doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1990 under Nehemia Levtzion, with a dissertation on the rise of Barquq and the shift from Turkish to Circassian rule in Egypt.

From 2003 to 2007 she headed the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Haifa. There she started a program in which Jewish and Arab students help each other with their studies, and a joint project with police cadet officers on spoken Arabic. She has spent sabbaticals at Tübingen, Oxford, Chicago and Princeton.

Her research covers the political and social history of the Mamluks and challenges much of the thesis of David Ayalon. She wrote a 1995 book on the third reign of al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qalawun and edited a 2022 volume on Egypt and Syria under Mamluk rule.