Gabrielle Russo is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University’s Department of History, affiliated with the ERC project ‘New Polities. Political Thought in the First Millenium’ and the Ghent Centre for Late Antiquity. Before arriving in Ghent, Gabrielle completed a BA (2020) in Arabic and Turkish and an MSt (2021) in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation at the University of Oxford and a PhD (2026) with the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge.
Gabrielle’s PhD thesis, ‘The Edge of Glory: The ʿAbbāsid Turkic Guard in Third/Ninth Century Praise Writing’ analysed praise writing dedicated to and on the topic of the Turkic military elite, with reference to al-Jāḥiẓ’s (d. 868/9) epistle Manāqib al-Turk (‘The Merits of the Turks’) and the poetry of al-Buḥturī (d. 897). This research bridged literary and historical scholarship to shed light on the relationship between praise writing and group definition, while also utilising poetry and questions of patronage to develop our knowledge of the Turkic guard. Gabrielle’s postdoctoral project continues to work with panegyric by using regional panegyric to consider idealised local leadership. Alongside research interests in classical Arabic literature and Islamic history, Gabrielle is also interested in Turkish literature and translation studies.