Robert Gard

F3 Robert Gard (ULUND)

Robert Gard is a doctoral candidate at Lund University (Sweden), working under the supervision of Christian Høgel. He holds an MA in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania (USA) and an MPhil in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Cambridge (UK). While his primary interests include pre-Islamic poetry, the ayyām al-ʿArab, Syriac monasticism, and Islamic historiography, he is currently focused on the propagation of the medical arts and their literary representation during the medieval period. His research project, entitled ‘Histories of Healing: Typological and Narratological Analysis of the Medical Case Study in Medieval Islamic Literature’, examines the relationship of medical theory to clinical practice as attested by medieval Islamic physicians, and looks to illuminate how case histories formed a conscious body of narrative literature with distinct generic demands and conventions that reflected and shaped the very practice of medicine itself.