Dr Fozia Bora
- Position: Associate Professor of Islamic History
- Areas of expertise: Arabic history and historiography; Islamic world book cultures; community curation in the museum/heritage sector; local and global histories of Muslims in Yorkshire
- Email: F.G.Bora@leeds.ac.uk
- Location: 402a Michael Sadler
- Website: Twitter | LinkedIn
Profile
My research and teaching are focused broadly on: (1) the history and historiography of early and ‘medieval’ Islam, specifically Arabic historical texts of the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk eras in the 6th–9th Islamic centuries (12th–15th centuries CE); and (2) the local and global histories of Muslim communities in West Yorkshire.
I took my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the University of Oxford, where I began my academic journey by studying for a BA in English, after which I spent two years working as a journalist in London. In subsequent postgraduate studies, I focused on Mamluk historiography, making a diplomatic edition of Ibn al-Furat's (d.1405) underappreciated yet rich account of late Fatimid rule from the unique autograph manuscript of his multi-volume universal chronicle of the Islamic world, and produced an historiographical analysis of this corpus of texts (some otherwise lost) dating from the 6th/12th century of Islamic history. My 2019 monograph revisited Ibn al-Furat's multi-genre inventory of texts in order to demonstrate archivality as an epistemic key to Mamluk historical writing, one which holds deep explanatory power alongside the well-trodden ground of encyclopaedism.
I received my doctorate in early 2011, taught Islamic history at the Markfield Institute of Higher Education from February 2010, took up a Research Fellowship at the Cambridge Muslim College in 2011/2012 and came to Leeds in September 2012, where I am based in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies (LCS).
I was the Convenor of the 2018-19 Sadler Seminar series Creating/Curating the Decolonial Classroom, and led a community engagement and curation pilot project in 2022 with Dr Vahideh Golzard, working with Persian and Arabic manuscripts and incunabula in the Special Collections of the Brotherton Library, funded by Research England. My current research focuses on a Muslim Somali ‘ethnographic village’ staged in Bradford in 1904: A Somali Village in Colonial Bradford | Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute
In March 2021 I was privileged to receive a Women of Achievement Award from the University of Leeds, in recognition my work on engaging communities outside academia with my research and for championing inclusive pedagogy in LCS.
Other roles
- Chair of the British Association of Islamic Studies
- Islam consultant for the Oxford English Dictionary (third edition) and for Oxford Dictionaries Online
- Contributor to the Encyclopaedia of Islam 3
- Trustee of the Gibb Memorial Trust
Publications
- ‘Ibn al-Furāt’, as a historian of the Crusades, in A. Mallett, The Franks and their Image in Medieval Muslim Texts, Brill forthcoming in 2023.
- ‘Archives and Archival Sensibilities in Medieval Arabic Historiography’ Essay for Maydān (a peer-reviewed online publication of George Mason University), 3 December 2019.
- Writing History in the Medieval Islamic World: The Value of Chronicles as Archives (I B Tauris, June 2019).
- 'Did Salah al-Din Destroy the Fatimids' Books? An Historiographical Enquiry', Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 25:1 (2015), pp. 21–39. This article was generously awarded the Royal Asiatic Society's Staunton Prize.
- 'A Mamluk Historian's Holograph. Messages from a Musawwada of Tar?kh', Journal of Islamic Manuscripts, Volume 3, Number 2, 2012 , pp. 119–153.
- Article for The Conversation (July 2015; reprinted in Newsweek Europe, Express Tribune Karachi and CNN): 'Discovery of ‘oldest’ Qur'an fragments could resolve enigmatic history of holy text'.
Recent Conference/Seminar Papers
- Anti-colonial resistance in a ‘human zoo’: subverting the archive of Bradford’s 1904 Somali Village’, Monday Majlis, University of Exeter, Novemebr 2024
- ‘Beyond “genre”: literary variety and text preservation in Ibn Khallikān’s biographical dictionary’, York Medieval Lecture (Spring Term 2023), February 2023
- 'Archives and archival sensibilities in medieval Arabic historiography', All Souls College, Oxford, October 2019
- 'Mukhtasar in the long view: abridgement as archival practice', Leeds International Medieval Congress, July 2018
- ‘Middle Period Arabic chronicles as archives of knowledge: theoretical and practical considerations’, workshop on Chronicles as Archives in Medieval Islamicate Contexts, Leeds Humanities Research Institute, December 2016
- 'Did Salah al-Din destroy the Fatimids' books?', RAS Fresh Perspectives Lecture at the Royal Asiatic Society, London, September 2015
Community Engagement
For the past several years I have: hosted or given talks on Islamic/Middle Eastern/Muslim community history at the Ilkley Literature Festival and the Bradford Literature Festival; spoken about my research at mosques (in London, Manchester, Edinburgh and online) and on Muslim community platforms; advised several West Yorkshire schools and local authorities on the teaching of Islamic History at school level; and advised publishers including OUP and Dorlng Kindersley on Islamic history topics in their UK school textbooks.
Media
My article for The Conversation July 2015 on the discovery of early Qur'an fragments in Birmingham University Library was reprinted in Newsweek Europe, the Express Tribune in Karachi and CNN.com: 'Discovery of ‘oldest’ Qur'an fragments could resolve enigmatic history of holy text'.
I have also contributed to television programmes including BBC Timewatch: Crusades, Forbidden Art with Mary Beard, to BBC Radio (Radio 4 and BBC Radio Scotland), to Newsweek and to the BBC website across multiple languages.
A short discussion of my latest research for BBC Sounds can be heard here: Rediscovering Bradford’s 1904 Somali Village.
Qualifications
- DPhil, Oriental Studies
- MPhil, Oriental Studies
- BA Hons, English
- Coaching & Mentoring, Chartered Management Institute Level 5 Certificate
Professional memberships
- British Association of Islamic Studies (BRAIS)
- British Association for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES)
- Middle East Medievalists
Student education
Research Supervision
(Co-supervision at 50–90%)
- Sally Stephens (MAR): The Zajal and the lost performance history of al-Andalus: Metric crossover, assimilation, and exchange [completed 2016, passed with Distinction]
- Farasat Latif (PhD): A comparison of four medieval Muslim historians' narratives of Saqifa [completed 2020]
- Atta Muhammad (PhD): The public sphere of the later Abbasid caliphate (1000–1258): the role of Sufism (funded by a Punjab Higher Education Commission PhD Scholarship) [completed 2020]
- Ivana Cosmano (PhD): Transforming Norms and Desires: Gendered Self-Fashioning Amongst Young, Educated Jordanians (funded by the LCS School Award for Excellence) [completed 2021]
- Sanah Mehnaz (PhD): Concepts of ‘honour’ in Islam and Muslim communities: perceptions, praxis and new modalities (funded by a White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities doctoral award) [completed 2022]
- Ali Alrashidi: Historical representations of the “Shī'ī Century” in the Islamic West: Fātimid discourses of legitimacy during the Maghribi phase (AH 297-360/909-969 CE)
- Husain Alajmi: Bypassing Sectarianism in Islamic Spain – A critical discussion of Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih’s (AH 246–328 / 860–940 CE) and Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr’s (AH 368–463/978–1071 CE) historiographic treatment of the Prophet’s family: intellectual independence in an Andalusian pattern [completed 2023]
- Iram Bostan: The Deficient Mind? Debating Rationality, Inferiority and the Religious Authority of Women within the Islamic Tradition (funded by a White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities doctoral award)
- Jawad Shah: Writing women in the Arabic biographical dictionary: authorship and authority in a reinvented genre (funded by the LCS School Award for Excellence)
- Eyad Houssami: Arabic and Decolonial Transmission in the Ecological Humanities: Knowledge Production in Post-Ottoman Beirut (funded by a White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities doctoral award)
Research groups and institutes
- Arabic
- History
- Gender
- Iqbal Centre
- Centre for World Literatures