Kitab-i fi al-tibb al-mansuri (The book on medicine dedicated to al-Mansur); Persian and Arabic; from the Mughal Imperial Library. Currently housed in the National Library of Medicine (U.S.). History of Medicine Division. Provenance unknown.

Hidden Stories Doctoral Fellow, PhD Candidate, University of Toronto BA (Hons)(UTM), M.A. (UofT), PhD (ABD)(UofT) Email: isra.saymour at utoronto.ca Website: https://saymour.notion.site/ Hidden Stories - Project Areas of Activity Provenance research  Reparations and return Asia and Africa Research Interests Heritage looting and illicit trade Decolonial approaches to documentary heritage Book mobility, circulation, and exchange Provenance and counter-histories

Biography 

I am a sociologist and criminologist working at the intersections of crime, law, and culture. My work uses critical provenance research and postcolonial theory to explore the looting and illicit trade of cultural heritage, with a focus on the dispossession of documentary heritage in projects of colonial and imperial control. I use provenance as a tool to reconstruct the dynamics of contested removal and trade, excavating hidden stories of looting. As a doctoral fellow for Hidden Stories, I bring this reconfigured provenance approach to the material we engage with, uncovering the unsettling truths and radical counter-histories buried within book histories. My dissertation, “A Mansion of Ruins: Manuscript Looting, Colonial Control, and the Plunder of the Mughal Imperial Library,” reframes looting as a social, political, and legal strategy of control. I am the founder and director of the Looting Lab, an interdisciplinary research hub responding to the urgent need to re-evaluate cultural dispossession, loss, and restitution.