Dr. Vidro currently teaches Worlds of Medieval Judaism at the college. Her primary research interests are intellectual and social history of medieval Jews in Muslim lands, Hebrew manuscripts and Qaraism. She has worked on the history of medieval grammatical traditions, including Qaraite approaches to Biblical Hebrew verbal morphology and the transmission of grammatical knowledge between the Muslim and the Jewish cultures. Her latest research is in the history of calendars and the socio-historical implications of calendar diversity, with an emphasis on the medieval Qaraite observational calendar and Saadya Gaon’s calendrical works. In a recently completed project she explored the possibility of using datable calendar fragments from the Cairo Genizah as points of comparison for handwriting analysis.
Dr Vidro’s full list of publications is available at:
https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=NVIDR71
Some recent publications include:
(2022) ‘The medieval Qaraite calendar in the Diaspora’, Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism 22/1, 279–308 (forthcoming)
(2021), ‘Aviv barley and calendar diversity among Jews in eleventh-century Palestine’, Journal of Jewish Studies 72/2, 283–312
(2021), ‘Al-Qirqisānī’s account of historical Jewish calendars and its dependence on the commentary on Genesis by Saʿadya Gaon: a study of Kitāb al-Anwār VII.1’, Ginzei Qedem 17, 11*–49*
(2021), ‘Dating medieval manuscripts with the help of calendars: an evaluation’, Revue des Études Juives 180/1–2, 193–205
(2021), ‘Non-Rabbanite Jewish calendars in the works of Jacob al-Qirqisānī and Saadia Gaon’, Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism 21.1, 149–87
(2021), ‘The 247-year Jewish calendar cycle: origins, diffusion, and diversity’, in Stern, S. (ed.), Calendars in the Making: The Origins of Calendars from the Roman Empire to the Later Middle Ages, 245–91
(2020), ‘A book on Arabic inflexion according to the system of the Greeks: a lost work by Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq’, Zeitschrift für Arabische Linguistik 72/2, 26–58
(2020), ‘Grammars of Classical Arabic in Judaeo-Arabic: an overview’, Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 8/2–3, 284–305
(2020), ‘The system of symbols for classifying Hebrew verbs in the Karaite grammatical tradition,’ in Bar-Asher Sigal, E., D. Yaakov (eds), Hebrew and Aramaic in the Middle Ages – Language Studies and Grammatical Thought, 314–26 (in Hebrew)