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I’m a historian of science and medicine in the medieval Islamic world, as well as in the colonial and postcolonial science and medicine. I am the director of the Center for Black, Brown and Queer Studies. I received my MD from Cairo University in 2005, and my PhD from the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris in 2010. I am the author of The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion and Charity (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Piety and Patienthood in Medieval Islam (Routledge Press, 2018), and Medicine and Religion in the Life of an Ottoman Sheikh (Routledge Press, 2019).

I am working on two new book projects. The first, co-authored with Prof. Katharine Park, is entitled Communities of Knowledge: Science in Medieval Europe and Islamdom (Under contract with Princeton University Press), and traces a connected history of science across traditional geographic and temporal boundaries using objects to investigate scientific thought and practice. The second, entitled Around the Clock: Time in Medieval Islamic Clinical Culture (Under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press), analyzes time as an epistemic and cultural category in medical thought and practice.