One of the founding faculty of NYU Abu Dhabi’s Arab Crossroads Program, Professor Justin Stearns grew up in various countries across the world. However, out of all the places that Stearns has lived in, he decided to settle in Abu Dhabi with his wife, Nathalie Peutz, who is also part of the NYU Abu Dhabi faculty.

Since settling in Abu Dhabi, Professor Stearns has connected with the local academic community and has busied himself with writing and translating several books, most recently publishing Revealed Sciences: The Natural Sciences in Islam in Seventeenth Century Morocco. Professor Stearns has tried to build relationships with other intellectuals interested in the Gulf region by bringing in guest speakers and running a luncheon series, among other efforts.

In 2011, Professor Justin Stearns published a book titled Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Premodern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean, which was about pandemics in the Middle Ages in the Islamic world, especially the Black Death. He elaborated that the Black Death is a relatively new name and that in those days it was referred to as the plague, or in Arabic, “the piercing”, which refers to the notion that individuals who caught the plague had been pierced by the arrows of jinn. About two years ago, his book began to gain more critical attention due to its relevance during the onset of the Covid-19 Pandemic. Professor Stearns commented that while it is nice to have his book attract attention, it is unfortunate that it is because of a modern pandemic similar to the Black Death. He suggested that the live experience of today’s world seems to have made his book more accessible to the general public.

Professor Stearns shared some of the tendencies he wrote about in his book that can still manifest in the modern world. He mentioned, “our tendency to pathologize disease [has not changed] … so when people get sick we become very quick to judge, even now when we understand how pervasive Covid is and how easy it is to get it.” In the Middle Ages, people also had to learn how to navigate economy, politics, and human interaction during the Black Death.

Professor Stearns teaches multiple classes at NYU Abu Dhabi, not all of which are offered every semester. These classes include: Faith and Science Reason and Revelation, Making of the Muslim Middle East, Sufi-ism, Orientalism, Paradise Lost, and Pandemics in the Muslim World. Paradise Lost is a class focused on the relationship between Abrahamic religions, especially in Arabic Spain, and Professor Stearns has taught the course at NYU Madrid as well as NYUAD.

He is currently working alongside about 20 NYUAD students to create a bilingual database that will allow people to search a plethora of historical Moroccan manuscripts in Arabic and English. According to Professor Stearns, “In the Muslim world, we have literally hundreds of thousands of manuscripts that are kept in various parts of the world that have not been edited and we don’t know what is in them. We don’t really have access to them and a lot of Islamic intellectual history. ” Professor Stearns believes this project will take roughly three to five years.

Although NYUAD has an Islamic Studies requirement, Professor Stearns believes that because it is general and many classes can be used to satisfy this requirement, NYUAD students are not fully taking advantage of the opportunity to learn about the region they are living in and its religion.