Sandars Readership in Bibliography
The Sandars Readership in Bibliography is one of the most prestigious honorary posts to which book historians, librarians and researchers can be appointed.
The Sandars Readership in Bibliography was instituted in 1895 with a bequest of £2000 left to the University by Mr Samuel Sandars of Trinity College (1837-1894), and continues today in the annual series of Sandars Lectures. Read more about the duties of the Reader here.
About the Sandars Reader 2025-26
Professor Marina Rustow
Professor Marina Rustow is a social historian of the medieval Middle East who works with sources from the Cairo Geniza, a cache of roughly 400,000 folio pages and fragments preserved in an Egyptian synagogue.
She received a B.A. (1990) from Yale University and two master’s degrees (1998), an M.Phil. (1999), and a Ph.D. (2004) from Columbia University. She taught at Emory University (2003–2010) and Johns Hopkins University (2010–2015) before joining the faculty of Princeton University, where she is currently a professor in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and History and director of the Princeton Geniza Lab.
Marina Rustow’s publications include Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (2008) and The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (2020).
The 2026 Sandars Lectures will take place on 17 and 18 November. More details on the Sandars programme will be confirmed (and updated here) in due course.
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