Michael Cooperson

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

Michael Cooperson (Ph.D. Harvard 1994) has been teaching in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA since 1994. 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).