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The Malian city of Timbuktu is one of the world's oldest seats of learning and has an intellectual legacy of hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, coming from three great West African desert empires. These manuscripts offer a unique window into their history. This lecture will look at how their study can be used to advance our knowledge of the intellectual history of the premodern world.
Richard Oosterhoff is senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, where he teaches early modern history and the history of science. He completed a PhD in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Notre Dame and taught