Edmund Burke III is professor emeritus, research professor of history, and former director of the Center for World History at University of California Santa Cruz. Robert J. Mankin (1952-2017) was director of Anglophone studies at the Université Paris Diderot (Paris VII) in France.
Burke has done more than any other scholar to preserve and project the legacy of Hodgson as both Islamic and world historian over the decades. This new collection of essays will add to the luster of Hodgson's earlier volumes, sparking renewed interest and intense debate about the nature of his stature as a global historian of the Islamic world. -- Bruce Lawrence, Duke University In our age of Islamophobia and renewed racialist and religious nationalisms, nothing could be more important than Marshall Hodgson's humanist and universalist vision, exemplified in his Venture of Islam. These essential essays on Hodgson stand as almost unique in exploring the life and thought of a major American thinker on Islam and Muslim civilization, and they will be indispensable to anyone concerned with world history. -- Juan Cole, University of Michigan