Krisztina Ilko

Dr Krisztina Ilko holds a Junior Research Fellowship at Queens' College, and serves as an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of History at Cambridge. She specialises in the Global Middle Ages pre-1500. Her current research (and second book) project, The Pawns of History: A New Approach Towards the Global Middle Ages, investigates the game of chess as a form of cross-cultural communication in the Afro-Eurasian world between 800 and 1400. Ultimately, this book addresses how the ‘global’ was experienced in the medieval period, and contributes to broader discussions about how the Middle Ages overlaps but also differs from the modern global world. An article deriving from this project, ‘Chess and Race in the Global Middle Ages’, has already been published in Speculum (2024).

Prior to her current position, Dr Ilko served as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford. She completed her PhD as a Lander Scholar at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, from which the last two years were spent as a Predoctoral Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.