Arezou Azad is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, and was Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Birmingham where she taught and supervised undergraduate and graduate students in Islamicate history. She is a historian of the medieval Islamicate East, and has previously worked on the staff of international charities and the United Nations in strategy development and fundraising. As an academic researcher, Dr Azad has authored a monograph and articles on the social, gender, landscape and topographic history of medieval Balkh (Afghanistan). She has co-authored three volumes of books that are forthcoming, including a revised edition and translation of the Faḍāʾil-i Balkh and a collection of articles based on the Balkh Art and Cultural Heritage project which she co-directed in 2011-15. From the autumn of 2019, Dr Azad will direct two new major research projects, which together investigate the early development of Persian and other languages through documents and religious and linguistic plurality in the medieval Islamicate East.