I received my Ph.D. from the University of St Andrews in 2016, and am currently employed as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Arabic Historiography at Ghent University.
My current research analyses the historical writings of Burhān al-Dīn al-Biqāʿī (d. 1480), a fifteenth-century Qurʾān exegete and historian, and engages with the debate over the agency of historiographical works, within which works are conceived as active participants in the generation of claims of historical reality. By drawing upon the methodologies and tools favoured by New Historicism, with its interest in the textuality of history and the historicity of texts, I argue that al-Biqāʿī’s works should be read not as mimetic descriptions of historical reality, but as carefully crafted literary works through which he mediates his own perspective and understanding of historical reality. In doing so, I demonstrate that al-Biqāʿī and his works are thoroughly entangled, and that the one can only be understood through the other.
