Join Dr Fozia Bora (University of Leeds) and Dr Shazia Jagot (University of York) in conversation.

Dr Fozia Bora is Associate Professor of Islamic History at the University of Leeds, Chair of the British Association of Islamic Studies, and a Trustee of the Gibb Memorial Trust. Bora was awarded her doctorate by the University of Oxford, then taught Islamic history at the Markfield Institute of Higher Education and took up a Research Fellowship at the Cambridge Muslim College before joining Leeds in 2012. Her book, Writing History in the Medieval Islamic World: The Value of Chronicles as Archives (I B Tauris, June 2019) revisited Ibn al-Furat's multi-genre inventory of texts in order to demonstrate archivality as an epistemic key to Mamluk historical writing, one which holds deep explanatory power alongside the well-trodden ground of encyclopaedism. Bora is currently writing a second book on the artistic, epistemological and archival value of the Arabic mukhtaṣar or digest, both across genres and in history-writing in particular. In 2021 Bora received a Women of Achievement Award from the University of Leeds, in recognition of her work on engaging communities outside academia and for championing inclusive pedagogy.

Dr Shazia Jagot is Lecturer in Medieval and Global Literature in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. She has worked at the University of Surrey (2017-19) and the University of Southern Denmark (2014-2017) as part of the Centre for Medieval Literature (SDU/York). Jagot gained her PhD from the University of Leicester during which she held a Junior Research Fellowship funded by the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) where she was based at the British Institute in Amman, Jordan. Her research interests lie in the literary, cultural, and historical interactions between medieval England and the Islamicate world with a strong interest in the medieval Mediterranean. She is currently writing her first monograph on Geoffrey Chaucer's Arabic 'sources' and runs an interdisciplinary project on Islamic art, material culture, and literary narratives across a broadly defined 'Silk Road'. Among this, Jagot is also a co-editor of the journal, Postmedieval, and she sits on the Managing Committee for the EU COST Action Network, Islamic Legacies in Europe (IS-LE).

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The MEMO on: The Global Middle Ages and Islamicate Worlds