Walter D. Ward is Professor and Chair of the History Department at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the author of two books, Mirage of the Saracen: Christians and Nomads in the Sinai Peninsula in Late Antiquity (2014) and Near Eastern Cities from Alexander to the Successors of Muhammad (2019), and the editor of The Socio-economic History and Material Culture of the Roman and Byzantine Near East: Essays in Honor of S. Thomas Parker (2017).