Emilie Savage-Smith

Professor of the History of Islamic Science (retired), The Oriental Institute, University of Oxford and Senior Research Consultant, Bodleian Library, Archivist & Former Fellow, St Cross College, Oxford.

Emilie Savage-Smith, Ph.D., FBA, has been with The Oriental Institute at the University of Oxford for the past twenty years, where she recently retired as the Professor of the History of Islamic Science. She has written extensively about the history of anatomy, surgery, dissection, and ophthalmology in the medieval Islamic world. She has also published books and articles on Islamic cartography, astronomical instruments, divinatory equipment, and magical techniques. Currently she is a Fellow of the British Academy, a member of the council (trustee) of the British Institute for the Study of Iraq (former British School of Archaeology in Iraq), co-president of the Society for the History of Medieval Science and Technology, and on the advisory board of several journals. She also serves as archivist for her college, St Cross College, and is Senior Research Consultant to the Bodleian Library.

Recent publications include a collaborative project between the Oriental Institute and the Bodleian Library that resulted in the electronic edition and translation of an early 11th-century highly illustrated Arabic cosmology, available at the website hosted by the Bodleian Library titled Medieval Islamic Views of the Cosmos: the Book of Curiosities. A descriptive catalogue of Arabic medical manuscripts in the Bodleian Library (one of the major such collections in the world) is currently in press, and The Book of Curiosities is now being prepared for printed publication.

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