Academia

Academia

 

My doctoral research explores English encounters with Arabic before 1635, and sheds light on how people engaged with the language, both at home and abroad. Much of my time is spent viewing and thinking about historical books and manuscripts, and I’m particularly interested in the material traces people left behind when they interacted with the language, like annotations in books, and how they wrote (or didn’t write!) the Arabic script. I enjoy sharing my work with both academic and non-academic audiences, and I’ve given papers and lectures in London, Manchester, Boston (USA), Chicago, Copenhagen, Paris and Leiden.

From 2022-3 I was a part-time research assistant on David Pearson’s Book Owners Online, and in 2024 I was a National Trust-British Library doctoral fellow, researching the provenance of Arabic manuscripts in both collections (you can read my research report here). During the pandemic I co-ran an online group for early-career book historians called Miscellany, which created an international network of PhD and ECR researchers.

I’m also a researcher-for-hire, and have conducted on-site research and transcriptions for authors, academics and researchers at institutions such as the Bodleian, the British Library and The National Archives. Being an early modernist and book historian, my strengths particularly lie in English palaeography, provenance and archival research.