Early Career Researchers

Because my research focus is on the contents of the sources rather than how closely they align with existing constructed narratives of the Viking world, I’m especially interested in textual transmission, manuscripts, and the movement of information between texts. This leads me to an additional aspect of research, which concerns how these medieval sources were received, studied, and transmitted in the early modern period, by orientalists, manuscript collectors, and northern antiquarians. For me, this is an essential aspect of considering the contexts of the sources I use, and thinking about how they have been adapted for study (typically in translation) by historians and researchers who do not typically deal with Islamicate history or geographical writing.

While my PhD is in history, my work is by necessity quite interdisciplinary, moving between disciplines and time periods and geographical regions. I started out working on the Viking Age, and moved into the study of Islamicate sources on the north and the Norse (particularly working on languages and engaging with texts and manuscripts) as it became clear that there was a lot of exciting work to be done in this area, and a lot of material which remained inaccessible or overlooked.

What are some career highlights or milestones that you are particularly proud of?

Most recently, I have been a Past & Present research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. My research there focused on Arabic and Persian discussions of Rūs funerary sacrifice – a ritual practice which scholars often consider central to Islamicate sources on the Viking world, and which most often leads to parallels between the Rūs and their “viking” counterparts in Scandinavia. Rather than aligning these accounts of funerary sacrifice with equivalent archaeological or ritual material, however, I focused especially on geographical sources which made comparisons between the Rūs and other cultures known to practice similar rituals during the Middle Ages, to consider how the pagan Rūs were imagined and envisioned on the world stage by the geographers who wrote about them, and to think about how they were classified against other populations and cultures.

Before that, in 2023 I defended my PhD in the Department of History and Classical Studies at Aarhus University: “Rūs Gender in Islamicate Sources: The Transmission of Geographical and Historical Ideas on the North in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish between the Third and Eleventh Centuries AH/Ninth and Seventeenth Centuries AD.” I have also held fellowships at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul and Koç University Mustafa v. Koç Maritime Archaeology Research Center (KUDAR).

What is the main focus of your current research, and why is it important?

During this postdoc, I am shifting my focus from sources on the Rūs to sources on Scandinavia – and the sources which specifically deal with the Scandinavians at home rather than Arabic accounts of raids on the Iberian Peninsula. Typically, historians and archaeologists have felt that the Islamicate sources on the Rūs (and especially the Arabic ones, many of which are more high-profile and more accessible than their Persian and Ottoman Turkish counterparts) offer better insights into the Viking world than do the sources on Scandinavians in Scandinavia. Certainly, trade routes and global connections mean that the sources on the Rūs are often more detailed and are informed by closer proximity to the geographical subject than we see with the material on Scandinavia, but this preference for the Rūs overlooks a lot of material on Scandinavia, some of it quite neutral and bland, some of it weird and wonderful. I’m exploring the source material we do have on Scandinavia, particularly in Arabic geographical sources, and considering what this information tells us about the flow of information on the north (town names and so on), as well as how Scandinavia fits (or doesn’t fit!) into geographical understandings of the Rūs.

Part of this also involves digging back into how these sources have been presented or studied. Like the Islamicate sources on the Rūs, scholars working on the Viking world have been aware of the sources on Scandinavia for over two hundred years. In tandem with my work on sources and manuscripts, then, I am digging back into nineteenth-century scholarship, particularly in Scandinavia, to explore initial reactions to these Islamicate sources, to evaluate what Norse antiquarians “recognised” in this source material and how that shaped their scholarship, and to consider the extent to which Islamicate geographical sources were utilised in the creation of a Viking Age narrative by these early researchers.

What do you hope to achieve or contribute during your time with us?

In terms of my research, I hope to deal with some new and not-so-familiar sources on the Viking world, to work with fresh approaches and re-evaluations of certain texts. But I’m also excited for collaboration and community – since arriving at WiVA I’ve already experienced the potentials for collaboration and overlap across different projects and disciplines, even for simple things like stopping in the office to share our expertise as we work on different things. Having that company as we work on our respective projects is really appealing.

How do you see your work aligning with or complementing our Centre's goals or mission?

First and foremost, because I try to work on a cross-disciplinary basis as I examine cultural contacts and the transfer of information, but also because I try to challenge existing narratives and existing stereotypes which have been built around this source material. By chasing sidelined or lesser-known sources, by focusing on the context of the sources themselves rather than simply cherrypicking from translated excerpts of Arabic geographical material to bolster an existing narrative of the Viking Age, and by highlighting the extent to which certain Arabic sources on the Viking world became popular because of the type of “viking” they presented, I’m working to deconstruct a long-established narrative, and subvert traditional images of “viking” in favour of something which might be a bit strange, unattractive, and contrary to long-standing stereotypes.

What impact do you hope your research will have, either in the academic community or beyond?

On an academic basis, I want to make some of these sources more widely available and accessible, and to open up fresh perspectives. I got into this line of research out of frustration that there was so much academic misinformation and misunderstanding about the Islamicate sources on the Viking world, but I understand that it is difficult to rectify this without making the necessary knowledge and material accessible – by drawing attention to this source material over the course of my own project, I hope that further work can be encouraged. I also want to work towards conveying this to a wider audience. There are many things about the Islamicate sources on the north and the Viking world which can be really fascinating to academic and non-academic audiences alike (Al Jazeera, for instance, made a two-part documentary on tenth-century traveller Ibn Fadlan last year) By adding new voices to the medieval conversation on what the world looked like, we can only strengthen public imaginings of the world in the Viking Age.