Ressources numériques en sciences humaines et sociales OpenEdition Nos plateformes OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypothèses Calenda Bibliothèques OpenEdition Freemium Suivez-nous

Elizabeth Lambourn

©Mikael Wallerstedt

Professor of Material Histories
De Montfort University, Leicester

Contact / elambourn@dmu.ac.uk 

Elizabeth Lambourn is a medieval historian of South Asia and the Indian Ocean world and committed to the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural study of history. First trained in Art History, she now spends a lot of her time reading, and talking to, anthropologists, archaeologists, and textual scholars and her work engages equally with texts and ‘things,’ and with texts as material ‘things.’ She has published widely on varied aspects of the circulation of artefacts, animals, people, and ideas around the Indian Ocean. Her research monograph Abraham’s Luggage (CUP, 2018) offers a fresh and methodologically sophisticated perspective on Jewish merchant activity in the Indian Ocean focusing on domestic material culture and foodstuffs on land and at sea. More recently she edited A Cultural History of the Sea. Medieval Age (800-1450) for Bloomsbury Academic (2021).

For the CallFront project, she is returning to material originally studied as part of her PhD, the richly inscribed corpus of marble carving produced for Muslim patrons at the port of Khambhat (Cambay) in western India and exported around the Indian Ocean rim. She is working with Nuria Garcia Masip exploring the potential of recreative practice methodologies to understand more about the production of this material.