Digital Al-Andalus: On the Record with Dr. Delfi Nieto-Isabel

How do historians find people and ideas that barely appear in the historical record? And what can those silences tell us about the medieval past? In this episode, Cristina Moreno-Almeida speaks with medieval historian Delfi Nieto-Isabel about who gets remembered, who gets erased, and how historians recover hidden histories, and the digital tools helping scholars uncover overlooked histories. Together they explore how ideas travelled across the medieval Mediterranean, why rumours and misinformation are older than we might think, and how historians can recover voices that rarely made it into official records. In This Episode 0:00 Introduction 0:47 Trailer 2:00 What makes Al-Andalus inspiring for a historian today? 6:28 Questioning historical narratives 13:25 Confrontational politics & othering 19:17 Myth making in the past & today 24:24 How can historical research reach the people? 33:41 Lightning Round About the Guest Delfi Nieto-Isabel is a Lecturer in Medieval and Digital History and Associate Fellow of the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences of Queen Mary University of London. She started out as a physicist and then became a medievalist. She got her PhD at the University of Barcelona in 2018, was a Research Associate and Visiting Lecturer in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School in 2021-22, and a Marie Skłodowska–Curie Fellow at Queen Mary. Currently, she's an Academic Fellow of Queen Mary's Digital Environment Research Institute, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and the Co-Director of the Digital Lives Programme at Queen Mary's Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Her research and teaching revolve around religious dissent, persecution and women's history. Forthcoming book: Networks of Defiance. Women and Heretical Conversion in Late Medieval Languedoc (Cornell University Press) Learn more: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/history/people... About the Project 'Digital Al Andalus: Radical Perspectives Of and Through Al Andalus (2023-2038)' is an ERC selected, UKRI funded project (https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=EP/...) exploring the uses, abuses, and afterlives of medieval history in contemporary culture and politics. The series brings together historians, media scholars, and cultural critics to examine how the past is remembered, mythologized, and mobilised today, from medieval Iberia to digital culture and online misinformation. Learn more: https://digitalalandalus.qmul.ac.uk/ Credits Producer, editing and sound: The Lens Box (email: [email protected]; Instagram @thelensbox) Artwork: Kate Nunn Felip Docolomansky Follow the Podcast YouTube:    / @digitalal-andalus   Instagram: @digitalalandalus Website: https://digitalalandalus.qmul.ac.uk/ Support the Project If you enjoyed this episode, consider subscribing, sharing the podcast, or leaving a review. It helps others discover the series and supports independent public history projects.