Between 1450 and 1550, a remarkable century of intellectual exchange developed across the Eastern Mediterranean. As Renaissance Europe depended on knowledge from the Ottoman Empire, and the courts of Mehmed the Conqueror and Bayezid II greatly benefitted from knowledge coming out of Europe, merchants of knowledge—multilingual and transregional Jewish scholars—became an important bridge among the powers. With his work, Robert Morrison is the first to track the network of scholars who mediated exchanges in astronomy, astrology, Qabbalah, and philosophy. 

Robert G. Morrison is George Lincoln Skolfield, Jr. Professor of Religion and Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Bowdoin College. He, in his research, has focused on major questions in the history of Islamic science. The first is what is Islamic about Islamic science? An answer came in his first book, Islam and Science: The Intellectual Career of Niẓām al-Dīn al-Nīsābūrī (Routledge, 2007). Nīsābūrī, his colleagues, and rivals engaged in a tradition of scholarship in which scientific and religious themes blended. This book was awarded the World Prize by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The other significant question that Morrison has addressed in his research is connections between Renaissance Europe and Islamic societies. His recent book, Merchants of Knowledge: Intellectual Exchange Between the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe (Stanford University Press, 2025) is his response. Jewish merchant scholar families mediated multi-disciplinary exchange in the Eastern Mediterranean. Research for this book was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In addition to these contextualist projects, Morrison has also carried out internalist studies. His second book, The Light of the World: Astronomy in al-Andalus (University of California Press, 2016), is a technical study of an astronomy text that was written in the Iberian Peninsula and traveled to the Ottoman Empire and to Padua. He found that The Light of the World contained versions of technical innovations from Ilkhanid Iran and Mamlūk Damascus.