Shazia Jagot

Profile

Biography

Shazia Jagot is Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Global Literature. She joined the Department at York in 2019 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2023. She is a literary historian of the premodern period and specialises in the intellectual, literary, and cultural transmissions between the Islamic World and late medieval England and the Mediterranean. 

Prior to York, Shazia was Lecturer in Medieval Literature at the University of Surrey (2017-19) and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Southern Denmark (2014-17) with the interdisciplinary, multilingual, international Centre for Medieval Literature (York/SDU; DNRF funded). She is graduate of the University of Leicester (BA and PhD) and Soas, University of London (MA). In 2012 she held a British Academy Junior Research Fellowship at the Centre for British Research in the Levant, which she spent in Amman, Jordan. 

Research

Overview

Shazia works across literary, intellectual, and cultural transmissions between the Islamic world and late medieval England and the Mediterranean bringing together her training in English Literature and Near and Middle Eastern Studies. She is interested in the cultural dissemination of ideas, narratives and visual and material culture and ways of approaching the dynamics of engagement with the broadly defined ‘East’ through literary, historical and intellectual contact.  Her research takes a multilingual and interdisciplinary approach and emphasizes an engagement with Arabic, Latin and Middle English. Shazia also works on modern and contemporary literature on Europe and the Muslim world and is interested in diachronic ways of working across both medieval and modern contexts and critical frameworks on orientalism, postcolonialism and global literature.

She is currently completing her first monograph, on the late medieval English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, Distilling Chaucer: Arabic Learning and the Islamic World in Fourteenth-Century England (working title) which will provide the first composite study of Chaucer’s Arabic ‘sources’ demonstrating an Arabic presence in the writings of this Middle English poet through intellectual learning (medicine, mathematics, astronomy and astrology, alchemy). She works on several polymathic figures and their materials of the period, including Avicenna (Ibn Sina), Averroes (Ibn Rushd), Ibn al-Haytham, and Ibn al-Zarqalluh with an interest in the interconnections and interface between literature and ‘scientific’ writings, the transmission of Arabic letters into Latin Christendom, and the artistic and material objects connected to these literary and intellectual movements. She is working on two secondary projects, a public-facing project on Medieval Britain and the Islamic World and a project on allegory, astronomy and fiction with a particular focus on the medieval scientific instrument, the astrolabe.  

Shazia has an additional interest in women’s literary, cultural, and scientific production of the period and their literary and scientific representations. She has published entries on a series of figures, including ‘Mariam’ al-Asturlabi in Women in the History of Science: A Sourcebook (2023) and in the British Library publication, Medieval Women: Voices and Vision (2024). 

Supervision

Shazia welcomes enquiries from prospective students working on topics connected to premodern literature; the history of science; visual and material culture; global literature.  

External activities

Overview

Shazia regularly speaks about her research at invited guest lectures, research seminars and teaching, and public-facing talks both nationally and internationally. In recent years, she has been invited to guest lectures and research seminars at the universities of Leeds, Sheffield, Oxford, Cardiff, Exeter, Kent, Lausanne and UCLA. In 2022, she contributed to the BBC 2 -Open University series, Art that Made Us. 

Shazia has extensive experience in editorial roles. Currently, she is a co-editor of the book series, Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture (Oxford University Press) with Ardis Butterfield (Yale) and Bruce Holsinger (Virginia). From Jan 2021-Dec 2024 (Volumes 12 to 16.1), Shazia served as Editor in Chief of the internationally acclaimed journal, postmedieval spearheading the journal’s move to a broader geographical, disciplinary, and linguistic remit.  In 2025, she was awarded two Editor of Distinction Awards for her outstanding editorial work, an Editorial Contribution Award for her meticulous and fair way of handling submissions and peer review, and an Author Service Award for her commitment to authors and development of their work. 

She serves on the advisory boards of the journals postmedieval, New Chaucer Society: Pedagogy and Profession, and the book series, York Medieval Press. She regularly peer-reviews for international journals, academic presses, and national and international research councils.

Between 2017-2021, she developed a collaboration with the Centre for Medieval Literature and the art museum, the David Collection (Copenhagen). Across 2018-2023, she served on the Managing Committee for the EU COST Action, Islamic Legacies in Europe, and more recently, from 2022-2024, she served as an advisory board member for the hugely successful British Library national exhibition, Medieval Women: in their own words (Oct 2024- Feb 2025). 

Teaching

Undergraduate

Shazia is a Fellow of the Higher Education Authority and holds a Graduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning (University of Surrey). She has extensive teaching experience across the curriculum at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. At York, she teaches on both core and specialist option modules including the second-year undergraduate World Literature Module ‘Medieval Arabic and Persian ‘Global’ Narratives, and the MA module, ‘Chaucer, Arabic Learning, and the East’. Shazia is committed to excellent teaching and to questions of decolonising and diversifying the study of literature and medieval studies. She has published work on her teaching practice in the journal, English (‘Knowing Outside of English: Decolonizing at York’ 2021) and Literature Compass (‘'Defamiliarizing Romance: The Arabic sīra in the English Literary Classroom' 2024). At York, she has worked with the Inclusive Learning team, the Humanities Research Centre, and the Centre for Medieval Studies, and wider cross-faculty initiatives on decolonising and diversifying the curriculum. Nationally, she has been involved in similar initiatives led by the English Association. 

Between 2021-22 and 2023-24, Shazia served as the Department’s Director of Undergraduate Teaching leading on curriculum reform and structural change.