Professor Elizabeth Lambourn

Elizabeth Lambourn is a historian of the Indian Ocean world, committed to the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural study of medieval history. After a PhD in Islamic Art from SOAS (University of London) she has travelled far from her foundations in art history. Her work engages equally with texts and ‘things,’ and with texts as material ‘things.’ Elizabeth has held fellowships at Harvard and Stanford, and a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2011-13). In Fall 2022 she was a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in Uppsala. Elizabeth is the author of the research monograph Abraham’s Luggage. A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World (2018) and editor of the volumes Legal Encounters on the Medieval Globe (2017) and A Cultural History of the Sea in the Medieval Age (2021). She was a founding board member of the journal The Medieval Globe and also sits on the Advisor Boards of the journals Medieval Worlds and EUP's new Journal of Islamic Art and Architecture. She currently advises for the series Approaching Medieval Sources (Routledge) and OUP's Oxford Studies in the New Medieval History.

 

History Research Group

Click here for a full listing of Elizabeth Lambourn‘s publications and outputs.

Abraham's Luggage. A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Legal Encounters on the Medieval Globe. Kalamazoo ILL: ARC Humanities Press, 2017.

Indian Ocean histories 600-1500, merchant material cultures, the material worlds of the Cairo Geniza "India Book," circulation and exchange of paper and metalwork. I am interested in supervising PhDs relevant to my areas of expertise and research.

PhD School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

MA (Hons.) University of Edinburgh, summa cum laude.

Fellow of the British Academy

Member of Advisory Board, Maldives Heritage Survey. PIs Dr. Michael Feener (Oxford Center for Islamic Studies) and P. Daly (Earth Observatory, Nanyang Technical University, Singapore), Arcadia sponsored

Member of Advisory Group, Royal Ontario Museum, The Indian Ocean: Crossroads of Globalization.

Member of International Advisory Board, Medieval Worlds, supported by the Austrian Academy of Sciences

Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Consortium member: CALLFRONT Calligraphic Scripts from the Frontier Regions of the Islamic World, directed by Prof. Brac de la Périère, Sorbonne Université, Paris.

Panel organiser CIHA 2024, Lyon, June 2024  Create, Recreate: Towards Experimental History of Art? (cihalyon2024.fr)

Forthcoming   “Ceramic Transport Jars – Clues to Persianate Actors and Networks in the Indian Ocean World (8th through 10th Centuries AD).” In Iran and Persianate Culture in the Indian Ocean World edited by Andrew Peacock. London: British Academy.

“No importance and no value”? Geniza sources on personal shopping and the ‘economy of regard.’” In The Economic and Maritime History of India and Beyond: Issues and Perspectives, Essays in Honour of Prof. Ranabir Chakravarti, edited by Suchandra Ghosh, 122-60. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

“Sweet Water on the Sea Route to China: Watering Stops and Torpedo-Jar Capacities in Long-Distance Indian Ocean Sailing,” Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022): 148-82.

“Jewish Merchants in the Indian Ocean Trade.” In Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Asian History, 2022. Available online at https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory.

“Some New Uses of the Geniza Mercantile Letter – On the Materiality of Writing in the Indian Ocean World.” In Fruit of Knowledge, Wheel of Learning: Essays in Honour of Professor Robert Hillenbrand, edited by Melanie Gibson, 158-79. London: Gingko Library, 2022.

Charlotte Wilkinson

Aya Alsheikh Salem

 

A Persian Church in the Land of Pepper - Routes, Networks and Communities in the Early Medieval Indian Ocean. 1 December 2011-30 September 2013, Principal Investigator, Co-Investigator Dr. R. Tomber The British Museum, and large network of international scholars. £35,974.66 (AHRC contribution) or £44,968.32 (FEC).

West Asia in the Indian Ocean 500-1500 CE., Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, 1 October 2011 - 30 September 2013. £85,85

Member of the AHRC Peer Review College (2012-2019).