Teresa Witcombe

Teresa Witcombe works on the religious, cultural, and intellectual history of the medieval Iberian Peninsula, with a particular focus on Muslim-Christian relations, translation and transfer across frontiers, and the formulation and curation of religious identities. Her training as a historian began at St John’s College, Oxford, where she completed a BA in History. This was followed by a Masters at the Sorbonne Paris-IV and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and several years working at UNESCO in Paris. Dr Witcombe received her PhD in History from the University of Exeter in 2019, where her doctoral research explored the remarkable life of Bishop Maurice of Burgos on the frontiers of the medieval Christian world (see her monograph, On the Edges of Christendom). Subsequently, she was awarded funding by the Leverhulme Trust to pursue postdoctoral research at the CSIC-CCHS in Madrid, where she studied medieval Christian understandings of Islam, with a particular focus on the translation of Islamic texts into Latin. During this period, Dr Witcombe also co-edited a volume on the reign of Fernando III of Castile (available here). Between 2022 and 2025, she held a British Academy postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Oxford, researching the movement of captives of war and slaves across the Muslim-Christian frontier in medieval Iberia. As an incoming fellow at the Koch History Centre, Dr Witcombe looks forward to expanding this work on interreligious enslavement by considering the theological and legal status of medieval slaves and captives of war, including the codes of conduct that determined their treatment and the extent to which their humanity was recognised by their captors.