Distinguished historian of Islam and SOAS Alumna: Patricia Crone
One of the most important historians of Islam in the last 50 years and whose contributions were pivotal in the study of early Islam, Patricia Crone died at the age of 70 on 11th July 2015 in Princeton, New Jersey.
Patricia Crone graduated from SOAS, University of London in 1969 where she learnt Arabic, adding later Persian and Syriac. Upon graduating with a First, she went on to write her PhD under the supervision of Bernard Lewis. She submitted her PhD thesis (The Mawālī in the Umayyad period) in 1973.
Upon earning her Ph.D., Crone became Senior Research Fellow at the University of London’s Warburg Institute. In 1977, she accepted a position as a University Lecturer in Islamic History and Fellow of Jesus College at the University of Oxford, where she taught for thirteen years. Following her time at Oxford, Crone moved to the University of Cambridge and served as an Assistant University Lecturer in Islamic Studies and was a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College from 1990-92, after which she was University Lecturer until 1994. Crone was then a University Reader at Cambridge until 1997, when she joined the Faculty of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey.
For a more details on her life and work, see her obituary published by the Institute of Advanced Studies where she was Professor Emerita in the School of Historical Studies, serving as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor from 1997 till her retirement in 2014.
https://www.ias.edu/crone-obituary
See also the introduction to Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts, Essays in Honor of Professor Patricia Crone, (eds. B. Sadeghi, A. Q. Ahmed, A. Silverstein, and R. Hoyland (Brill 2015), xiv-xx) .
This introduction has been republished by Judith Herrin in her blog post entitled “Patricia Crone: memoir of a superb Islamic scholar “ :https://www.opendemocracy.net/judith-herrin/patricia-crone-brief-memoir