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.
