Treasures of the Medieval Islamicate World: Stories of Empire and the Everyday

Dr Matin Arghandehpour

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.

Dr Arezou Azad

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).

Hugh Kennedy

Speaker

Dr Nadia Vidro

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.