Tonicha Upham is a Past & Present Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, London. Her current postdoctoral project focuses on comparative approaches to funerary sacrifice in medieval Arabic geographical texts. She defended her thesis, "Rūs Gender in Islamicate Sources: The Transmission of Geographical and Historical Ideas on the North in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish between the Third and Eleventh Centuries AH/Ninth and Seventeenth Centuries AD", at Aarhus University in 2023.
Experience
2023–present
Past and Present Research Fellow, Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London
2023–2023
Joint fellowship in Nordic-Byzantine relations, Koç University Mustafa v. Koç Maritime Archaeology Research Center (KUDAR) and the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul
2023–2023
Research Assistant, Aarhus University
2019–2023
PhD Fellow, Aarhus University
2022–2022
Visiting Research Fellow, Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul
Education
2023
Aarhus University, PhD, History
2019
University of Iceland, MA, Viking and Medieval Norse Studies
Publications
2024
Rus Women in Islamicate Geography? Approaching a Study of Gender, The Making of the Eastern Vikings: Rus and Varangians in the Middle Ages, ed. Sverrir Jakobsson, Thórir Jónsson Hraundal, and Daria Segal
2023
“Here I am, in this far-off land where we are now”: Encountering and Observing Rūs Women in Ibn Faḍlān’s Risala, Medieval Mobilities: Gendered Bodies, Spaces, and Movements in the Middle Ages, ed. Basil Arnould Price, Jane Bonsall, and Meagan Koury
2022
Keeping Abreast of Foreign Fashions: Rationalizing Rūs Brooches in a Sixteenth-Century Persian Version of Ibn Faḍlān’s Risala, Medieval Encounters
2022
A Closer Look: Arabic Descriptions of the Rus, RUS - Vikings in the East, ed. Pauline Asingh and Kristian Jensen
2022
Ved nærmere øjesyn: Arabiske beskrivelser af rusvikingerne, RUS – Vikinger i Øst, red. Pauline Asingh og Kristian Jensen
Grants and Contracts
2023
North and South: Comparative Sacrificial Geographies in Medieval Arabic Sources