Speaker
Mateen is a historian and a filmmaker. He received his PhD from UCL in 2024, and his thesis considered how Persians attempted to manipulate the Greek states by means of their religious culture during the Greek-Persian Wars of the 5th century BC. His work deals mainly with historiography and intercultural interaction. He is interested in ancient languages, cultures and religions. He joined the Invisible East Project in 2024 to help with data entry and the production of a short film.
Speaker
Arezou Azad holds the Chair in the Art and Heritage of Afghanistan at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientale in Paris and is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and Director of the Invisible East programme. She is the author of Sacred Landscape of Medieval Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2013) and The Warehouse of Bamiyan (Edinburgh University Press, 2025).
Speaker
Helen is a medieval historian with wide interests. Current research projects include aspects of British history in the sixth and seventh centuries, including the conversion to Christianity and connections with the Byzantine empire, the use of English in the liturgy before the Reformation, spanning the period from c. 700 c.1550AD and the early medieval and medieval history of Cerne Abbas, Dorset.
Speaker
Edward Shawe-Taylor is a doctoral researcher at the Khalili Research Centre, University of Oxford and the Assistant Database Manager of the Invisible East Project. His research focuses on the evolution of scripts in the medieval Islamic world, particularly their role in articulating political authority. His work examines the visual importance of chancery scripts as vehicles of political power, exploring how these symbols of authority were formalised and disseminated through chancery traditions across the Islamic world, and how they migrated into other artistic media such as textiles, woodwork, metalwork, and architectural decoration.
Speaker
Nadia Vidro is the Editorial Fellow for the Invisible East programme and a cultural and intellectual historian of medieval Jews in the Middle East. She holds a PhD in Hebrew Studies from Cambridge (2010), and an MA in Jewish Studies (major), Islamic Studies (minor) and General Linguistics (minor) from the University of Cologne (2004). Nadia researches Jewish manuscripts from the Islamicate world, from Egypt and the Levant in the West to Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan in the East.
Speaker
Jade’s research focuses on how people and environments have interacted through time. She is particularly interested in the emergence of farming in southwest Asia and the plant management strategies that underpinned this, as well tracking the long-term socio-economic consequences of farming. She has worked on fieldwork projects in Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Türkiye, Siberia and Italy. As a publicly engaged researcher, Jade has also developed a diverse portfolio of public engagement with research (PER) activities, designing and delivering projects to communicate with public audiences. This includes Farming: The First 12,000 Years a collaboration with the Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford) and The Museum of English Rural Life (Reading).
