Professor Emilie Savage-Smith FBA

The history of medicine and science in medieval Islam; medieval Arabic artefacts and treatises relating to ophthalmology, anatomy, cartography (celestial and terrestrial), and divinatory techniques

Elected 2010

Fellow type
UK Fellow
Year elected
2010

Emilie Savage-Smith retired as Professor of the History of Islamic Science at the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, but continues as Fellow Archivist of St Cross College. In 2013 she was awarded a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award for 'A Literary History of Medicine: The Best Accounts of the Classes of Physicians by Ibn Abi Usaybi`ah (d. 1270)' a joint Oxford/Warwick project in collaboration with Simon Swain, FBA, Professor of Classics at the University of Warwick and Geert Jan van Gelder, FBA, retired Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford, and six other scholars. Its aim is to make this remarkable historical source fully available in a reliable and readable form. For the project, see http://www.alhom.org.uk. The award was supplemented in 2015 by a Wellcome Trust public engagement grant ('Medieval Medicine in Board and Card Games'), to work with the Museum of the History of Science in designing proto-types of board games through which children and adults can learn about medieval medical practice in Islamic lands. She is also Section Editor, responsible for Science & Medicine, for the Encyclopaedia of Islam's Three, and on the advisory board of a number of journals.

Current post

Senior Research Consultant, The Bodleian Library; Archivist (Fellow Archivist), St Cross College; ,

Past appointments

Oriental Institute, University of Oxford Professor of the History of Islamic Science

Publications

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