Associate Professor of Classical Studies, Affiliate of History, Middle East Studies, and Judaic Studies
She/her/hers
About
Interests include: Greco-Roman and Islamicate medicine and philosophy, Galen and Galenism, the Second Sophistic, Greco/Syriac-Arabic translation movement, science communication, science technology and society (STS) studies
As an intellectual historian with training in Classics, I am interested in how Greco-Roman and medieval Islamicate authors articulate categories of knowledge such as ‘medicine’, ‘philosophy’, and ‘science’. My research explores in various ways the concept of disciplinarity, especially how the boundaries between disciplines are drawn and policed in contests for epistemic authority. My first monograph, Galen and the Arabic Reception of Plato’s Timaeus (Cambridge University Press, 2020; winner of the SCS 2021 Goodwin Award of Merit), looks at the polemical use of Plato’s cosmological dialogue by the Greek doctor Galen of Pergamum (d. c. 217) to contest philosophy’s exclusive right to define, describe, and explain the different domains of reality. I argue that, in so doing, Galen sets out to establish medicine as a reliable authority on not only the body but also the soul and the wider cosmos. Moreover, this study shows that Galen’s engagement with the Timaeus became a touchstone for Islamicate thinkers’ own disciplinary agendas.
I am currently preparing a second monograph (Greek Science and Semitic Secularisms: Greco-Arabic Studies in the 20th Century) that offers an intellectual biography of modern Greco-Arabic Studies. Specifically, it looks at 19th and early 20th-century Muslim and Jewish orientalists' invocation of a continuous link between Greece and Islam to contest their exclusion from European life. Using the critical frame of self-orientalism, which recognizes the agential work 'orientalism' can do for 'orientalized' individuals, I foreground archival documents that acribe to the 'Semitic' a privileged perspective on the supposedly Hellenic foundations of 'western' culture, science and philosophy. The book pursues themes such as the racialization of language and culture as well as the secularization of religion (Islam, in particular) through its history of the subfield of Greco-Arabic Studies. It also offers a critique of the objectivity that Greco-Arabic Studies and Classics more broadly have ascribed to themselves through their supposedly scientistic methodology – philology.
Translation Projects
Having published a number of articles on Greco-Roman medicine and philosophy and their reception in the pre-modern Middle East, I would be delighted to supervise graduate students interested in working on any facet of the history of medicine, science, and technology from the classical to medieval period.
