My research examines connected histories of knowledge across the premodern Islamicate world and Mediterranean, encompassing the histories of science, technology, and everyday knowledge, and extending to visual and material culture. Following a PhD in the History of Knowledge at the Warburg Institute (University of London) funded by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership, I am now a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC project UseFool. My work is centrally concerned with questions about how diverse actors sought to understand the natural world and develop techniques to intervene within it, along with the social systems in which these practices unfold.
As part of the UseFool team, I am editing and translating The Best of True Information and the Explanation of Their Ways, an expansive manual of techniques written in Arabic by the thirteenth-century scholar Abū Qāsim al-ʿIrāqī. The Best of True Information incorporates multiple streams of knowledge, from artisanal crafts and agriculture to medicine and natural magic. I am examining the diverse techniques, described in The Best of True Information and other premodern handbooks, that use animal parts, plants, and minerals. I am particularly interested in how these techniques construct and contest the different causal frameworks that make natural things 'work'.
My other current research interests include ideas of 'natural' and 'artificial' generation across diverse spheres of knowledge, from alchemy and medicine to horticulture and husbandry, and the intersections in premodern Arabic sources between discussions of generation and understandings of human difference.
