Throughout 2022, MEMOs will be running a series in partnership with the Society for Renaissance Studies where we will host leading scholars of colour in our field, pair them with a suitable member of our MEMOs research team, and they will have a live chat show style discussion on a specific theme. This will be followed by an attendee question and answer session.

The second event in our series entitled ‘The MEMO On’ will feature a discussion between Professor Nandini Das and Dr Lubaaba Al-Azami on ‘Early Modern English Diplomacy in the Islamic Worlds’. We would love if you could join us to listen to and engage with what we are sure will be a fascinating conversation!

REGISTER HERE: https://www.crowdcast.io/c/memo-on-emed

Professor Nandini Das works on Renaissance literature and cultural history, with special emphasis on travel and cross-cultural encounters, and issues of migration and belonging. She has edited and written on sixteenth and early seventeenth century romance and prose fiction in Robert Greene’s Planetomachia (2007), and Renaissance Romance: The Transformation of English Prose Fiction, 1570-1620 (2011), among others, and published widely on travel and cross-cultural encounter. Most recently, with Tim Youngs, she co-edited The Cambridge History of Travel Writing (2019), which covers global Anglophone and non-Anglophone travel writing from antiquity to the internet. Professor Das is volume editor of Elizabethan Levant Trade and South Asia in the forthcoming edition of Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, to be published by Oxford University Press, and project director for ‘Travel, Transculturality and Identity in Early Modern England’ (TIDE), funded by the European Research Council. She regularly presents television and radio programmes on topics related to her research.

Dr Lubaaba Al-Azami is founding editor of Medieval and Early Modern Orients (MEMOs). She is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Liverpool. Her AHRC NWCDTP funded research considers early modern English encounters with Mughal Indian imperial women, exploring English drama and travel literature alongside Mughal royal memoirs. She completed her BA in English at King’s College London, an MA in Islamic Studies at SOAS, University of London and an MA in English from The George Washington University, Washington DC. During 2020/21 she was a visiting doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. She is founder of Network of Sisters in Academia (@NeSATweets), a professional network of Muslim women academics. Her research interests include early Anglo-European encounters with the Islamic Worlds, early modern theatrical negotiations of transnational politics, trade and religion, intersectionality, decolonialism and well-brewed tea. She is currently writing a book on the first English travellers to India for John Murray Press. Lubaaba is represented by Northbank Talent Management and tweets @Lubaabanama.