This past Wednesday, Professor Kristina Richardson, a Phi Beta Kappa visiting scholar and faculty member at the University of Virginia, delivered a talk examining the Indian-Ocean slave trade that began in the seventh century.

Richardson’s research has been met with praise – she received the Dan David Prize for her monograph “Roma in the Medieval Islamic World: Literacy, Culture, and Migration.” In her lecture, Richardson shared her research on the writings of non-elite groups in the Middle East during the premodern and medieval periods.

“In our historiography of the Middle East, we’ve really cut off everything below [South of Ethiopia] as irrelevant to our own history, even to human history,” Richardson said.