Jere L. Bacharach Service Award
Marlis J. Saleh
University of Chicago
2022 Co-Recipient
Marlis J. Saleh
Marlis J. Saleh
Dr. Saleh received her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago with a dissertation on relations of the Coptic Christian community of Egypt with the Fatimid government, which was awarded Honorable Mention for MESA’s Malcolm Kerr Dissertation Award in 1995. She was then hired by the University of Chicago’s Middle East Collection at Regenstein Library, where for many years she worked as the main assistant to the Middle East Bibliographer, Bruce Craig. Upon his retirement, and after an extensive and open search, Dr. Saleh was appointed Chicago’s Middle East Bibliographer, and has been throughout her career in the library an active and supportive presence who has assisted students, faculty, and scholars from all over the world with their research and has continued to build Chicago’s massive Middle East library collection. She regularly notifies faculty and students of new resources that might be helpful to their research, and she is unfailingly willing to try securing microfilms of manuscripts or other things needed by the library’s patrons. She coordinates the library’s Middle East Documentation Center (MEDOC), which embraces several separate initiatives, including compiling a large and constantly growing collection of microform copies of manuscripts in various Middle Eastern languages from repositories all over the world.
Dr. Saleh also has been an active member of the Middle East Librarians Association (MELA) for many years, serving for fifteen years (and counting) as editor of its journal, MELA Notes. In this way, she provides invaluable support to all students of the Middle East, and in particular to the Middle East librarians who make the scholarly and pedagogical work of the rest of us possible.
Of particular note has been Dr. Saleh’s long and steady support for the field of Mamluk studies. She has been a stalwart in the organization of the School of Mamluk Studies based at the University of Chicago, serving on its organizing committee, which sponsors regular conferences on Mamluk studies.
She also maintains the Mamluk Bibliography Online, a fundamental research resource, which contains thousands of references to primary sources and secondary scholarship dealing with the Mamluks.
The same applies to Dr. Saleh’s service as editor of Mamluk Studies Review, one of the most important scholarly publications on medieval Islamic history. Dr. Saleh negotiated a difficult transition from print to a digital format, readily assists non-native-English-speaking scholars from the Arab world in polishing and publishing their research in English, and has throughout maintained its high standards of peer review for pre-modern Islamic history.
Dr. Saleh is always ready to offer her advice and help to scholars and students and is a tireless and avid collaborator in all of the academic projects related to Mamluk Studies. Her dedication to her institution, to her position as a librarian, to librarianship in general, and last but not least to scholarship, are models of service to the field and to the profession.
This award is therefore also given to Dr. Saleh in recognition of her long and devoted service as bibliographer and her enthusiastic support of Mamluk studies.