Phone: 828-227-3866
Email:  apkurt@email.wcu.edu
Office Address: McKee Building 207

Dr. Kurt comes to Western Carolina University from Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, MI, where he taught for three years.  His Ph.D. is from the University of Toronto.  He has taught courses in several fields including Islamic history, Middle East regional studies, Christian-Muslim Relations, and Medieval European history.  His research has focused on Visigothic Spain and interconfessional relations in Muslim Spain as well as on European-Ethiopian relations in the late Middle Ages and the search for the fabled Prester John in Ethiopia.  He will soon publish a book with Moneta Press (Wetteren) derived from his dissertation, entitled Minting, State and Economy in the Visigothic Kingdom:  From Settlement in Aquitaine through the First Decade of the Muslim Conquest of Spain.  He has published several articles on the early Middle Ages and on Islamic history, including lengthy entries on the Songhai Empire (Islamic West Africa, 1400-1600) and the Solomonid Empire (Ethiopia, 1270-1480) for Encyclopedia of the Empires of the World (Facts on File) and shorter entries on Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and on the Mahdist Revolt (Sudan, 1881-99) for The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest:  1500 to the Present (Blackwell Publishing).  Last year Dr. Kurt received a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant to attend a Summer Institute (The Medieval Mediterranean and the Emergence of the West, Barcelona, 2008); in 2007 he was awarded a Pew Teaching Development Grant and other awards from Grand Valley State University covering travel to Cairo, Egypt, and several cities in Morocco.