Academic rigor, journalistic flair
Past and Present Research Fellow, Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London
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
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2023–presentPast and Present Research Fellow, Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London
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2023–2023Joint fellowship in Nordic-Byzantine relations, Koç University Mustafa v. Koç Maritime Archaeology Research Center (KUDAR) and the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul
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2023–2023Research Assistant, Aarhus University
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2019–2023PhD Fellow, Aarhus University
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2022–2022Visiting Research Fellow, Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul
Education
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2023Aarhus University, PhD, History
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2019University of Iceland, MA, Viking and Medieval Norse Studies
Publications
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2024Rus 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
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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
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2022Keeping Abreast of Foreign Fashions: Rationalizing Rūs Brooches in a Sixteenth-Century Persian Version of Ibn Faḍlān’s Risala, Medieval Encounters
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2022A Closer Look: Arabic Descriptions of the Rus, RUS - Vikings in the East, ed. Pauline Asingh and Kristian Jensen
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2022Ved nærmere øjesyn: Arabiske beskrivelser af rusvikingerne, RUS – Vikinger i Øst, red. Pauline Asingh og Kristian Jensen
Grants and Contracts
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2023North and South: Comparative Sacrificial Geographies in Medieval Arabic Sources
- Role:
- Postdoctoral Researcher, own project
- Funding Source:
- Past & Present
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2022Sidelined Sources on the North
- Role:
- Visiting Researcher, own project
- Funding Source:
- Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul
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2019Legends of the Eastern Vikings
- Role:
- MA student
- Funding Source:
- The Icelandic Centre for Research
