Michael Cooperson

E-mail: cooperso@humnet.ucla.edu Phone: 310-206-1383 Office: 376A Kaplan Hall

Michael Cooperson (Ph.D. Harvard 1994) is a Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. His research addresses the literary and cultural history of Southwest Asia in the pre-modern period, primarily through Arabic sources. His first two monographs focus on the age of the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun (r. 813-33), who sponsored the translation of scientific works from Greek, Syriac, and other languages. Cooperson is the translator of Ibn al-Jawzi’s hagiographic Life of Ibn Hanbal (winner of the Sheikh Hamad Award, 2016) and of al-Hariri’s comical Impostures (winner of the Sheikh Zayed Award, 2021). In addition to Arabic literature and Arabic-to-English translation, he has taught the Maltese language at UCLA, as well as a course on time travel as a literary device in stories from around the world. Of Greek descent on his mother’s side, he is an admirer of Byzantine and Modern Greek literature. During the 2024-25 academic year, he will be teaching the advanced Modern Greek course (Greek 140: Topics in Greek Language and Culture).