Background
Cobb was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he attended public schools.
historian university professor
Cobb was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he attended public schools.
In 1989, he graduated from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst with a Bachelor (cum laude) in Anthropology. In 1991, he received his Master of Arts in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago and then studied at CASA, the Center for Arabic Study Abroad, in Cairo, Egypt. He returned to Chicago and in 1997 he received his Doctor of Philosophy in Islamic history from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.
He is currently Professor of Islamic History at the University of Pennsylvania. His areas of interest include Islamic relations with the West, historiography, and the history of travel and exploration. He is, in particular, a recognized authority on the history of the Crusades in their Islamic context.
He has taught at Smith College (1996-1997), Wake Forest University (1997-1999), the University of Notre Dame (1999-2008), and the University of Pennsylvania (2008–present).
He currently splits his time between Philadelphia and Amherst. His interest in the history of Syria led him to the life and times of the adventurer and poet Usama ibn Munqidh (d 1188).
Cobb’s biography of him, Usama ibn Munqidh: Warrior-Poet of the Age of Crusades (2006) is intended as a short and accessible sketch, based upon all of Usama’s surviving works, some of which have been only recently discovered. Cobb’s exploration of Usama’s world has in turn led him to pursue other problems in the history of the Crusades, most prominently in his The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (2014), which is intended as an accessible narrative history of “the Frankish problem” on all shores of the Mediterranean, from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, based almost exclusively upon Islamic historical sources and rooted in the context of Islamic history.