Sarah B​owen Savant 

Sarah Bowen Savant ​is a Professor of History and the founding director of the Centre for Digital Humanities at the Aga Khan University (AKU). She leads the Arabic Digital Humanities KITAB project (Knowledge, Information Technology, and the Arabic Book) and has been the Principal Investigator or co-investigator on grants from the British Academy, the European Research Council, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Qatar National Library. In addition to her research leadership, she serves as a member of the Senior Management Team at AKU's Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (ISMC) and on advisory boards, including for the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR).


​​Research I​​nterests

  • History and historiography of the Middle East
  • Book History
  • Digital Humanities focused on Islamicate contexts
  • Machine learning for Arabic-script languages
  • Memory Studies
  • Cultural History

Selected Publications​​​​​​​

  • Savant, S. (2026). The making of the Arabic book: How text reuse built a world tradition. Edinburgh University Press. (Data co-produced with Masoumeh Seydi)

  • Savant, S., Muther, R., & Smith, D. (2023). From networks to named entities and back again. Journal of Historical Network Research, 8, 1–20. https://jhnr.net/articles/10.25517/jhnr.v8i1.135

  • Savant, S., Nigst, L., Romanov, M., Seydi, M., & Verkinderen, P. (2019–2023). OpenITI: A machine-readable corpus of Islamicate texts (Versions 2019.1.1–2023.1.8). Zenodo. https://zenodo.org/records/10007820

  • Savant, S. (2022). Al-Ṭabarī's unacknowledged debt to Ibn Abī Ṭāhir Ṭayfūr. In M. van Berkel & L. Osti (Eds.), The historian of Islam at work: Essays in honor of Hugh N. Kennedy. Brill.

  • Savant, S., Fudge, B., Ghanea-Bassiri, K., & Lange, C. (Eds.). (2022). In non sola scriptura: Essays on the Qur'an and Islam in honour of William A. Graham. Routledge. In same volume, Savant, S. (2022). People versus books, 281-302.

  • Savant, S., & Montazer Mahdi, M. (2018). The history of Iranian cities through their books: What Ms. Köprülü 01589 tells us about 8th/14th century Shiraz. Journal of Eurasian Studies, 16(1–2), 430–64.

  • Savant, S., & Webb, P. (Trans.) (2017). The excellence of the Arabs: A translation of Ibn Qutaybah's Faḍl al-ʿArab wa l-tanbīh ʿalā ʿulūmihā. New York University Press.

  • Savant, S. (2013). The new Muslims of post-conquest Iran: Tradition, memory, and conversion. Cambridge University Press. (Winner of the Saidi-Sirjani Book Award)


Pers​onal links

Sarah Savant X

Sarah Savant LinkedIn

Sarah Bowen Savant AKU