Introducing our interim Associate Director: Dr Zubin Mistry

Hello Zubin! You’re joining us as interim Associate Director while Wannes Dupont is on research leave. But this isn’t your first involvement with GENDER.ED, is it? 

That’s right. I’ve previously sat on the GENDER.ED steering group through my involvement in the Histories of Gender & Sexuality research group in my home School. I also helped to organize and edit two GENDER.ED Blogathons during the annual 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence in 2021. 

Speaking candidly, the blogathon was an intense experience - there was a lot of burning the midnight oil! That’s partly because we worked across three time zones with partners based in India and Australia. But I relish editorial work and, more importantly, the stories told in the blogs are inspiring, humbling and sometimes arresting. Helping to provide a platform for those stories felt like it matters. So, I was involved again in the 2022 Blogathon, which focused on a theme with ongoing political pertinence: migration, mobilities and displacement. 

What are you researching at the moment? 

I’m a medieval historian and my research focuses on the history of reproduction and, increasingly, the history of medicine, healing and care work. I’m currently working on two edited volumes with contributions from various historians. One aims to provide introductory windows onto pregnancy and childbirth in medieval societies. The other, entitled Ecologies of Healing in the Premodern World, foregrounds the social environments of healing and reenvisions premodern medicine as a dynamic, interactive and situated practice inseparable from the interdependent relationship between ideas, people and place. I’m also slowly working on a couple of articles: on explaining the presence of reproductive medical texts in medieval monasteries, and on tolerance and even justification of abortion in medieval societies lacking explicit advocacy for abortion. 

What plans do you have for GENDER.ED? 

My only consistent source of analogies in life is football – and I guess I think of being interim director as a bit like being a caretaker manager. During my stint I will be taking the lead on GENDER.ED’s profile around fostering research, knowledge exchange and impact, seeking to support GENDER.ED’s work in developing and sustaining connections across the University. 

Is there anything else you’d like to share?

Thank you for asking that question, which – of course – I did not plant in any way whatsoever. It’s worth sharing the exciting news that Edinburgh will be the new home of the journal Gender & History for the next five years. I’m lucky to be acting as an editor alongside five excellent colleagues from History. 

Zubin Mistry is a Senior Lecturer in Early Medieval History at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology.