Dr. Nadia Vidro is a cultural and intellectual historian of medieval Jews in Muslim lands, with a strong focus on the history of the Jewish calendar, history of grammar and Qaraism.

Dr. Vidro’s current project is “Saadya Gaon’s Works on the Jewish Calendar: Near Eastern Sources and Transmission to the West” (2021–2024) funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and led by Prof. Sacha Stern (UCL) and Prof. Ronny Vollandt (LMU). Saadya Gaon was the pre-eminent scholar of Judaeo-Arabic culture in the 10th century. Nadia reconstructs and edits the full corpus of Saadyanic calendar writings and studies Saadya’s contribution to the development of calendar theory, and the role of his works in fomenting or resolving Near Eastern communal conflicts over the calendar and in the diffusion of the calculated Jewish calendar to the West.

In 2018–2021 Dr. Vidro worked as a Senior Research Fellow in the project “Qaraite and Rabbanite Calendars: Origins, Interaction, and Polemic”, funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and led by Prof. Sacha Stern (UCL) and Prof. Ronny Vollandt (LMU). In her research she investigated the origins of the Qaraite calendar and studied the calendar disagreement between Qaraites and Rabbanites, its significances on each side of the debate, and its polemical uses. This research also reflected on how people ran their lives with different timeframes and calendars, and on the impact this exerted upon the sense of social belonging and identity.

At the same time, Dr. Vidro explored the possibility of using datable calendar fragments from the Cairo Genizah as points of comparison for handwriting analysis and produced a timeline of Genizah calendar fragments in the project “Calendar Fragments as a Tool for Palaeography” (British Academy Small Research Grant, PI Dr. Ben Outhwaite, Cambridge).

In 2013–2018 Dr. Vidro was employed as a Research Associate in the ERC-funded project “Calendars in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Standardization and Fixation” (PI Prof. Sacha Stern), where she studied popular, non-standard Jewish calendars in medieval manuscripts. Easy to produce, these calendars were incompatible with the normative rabbinic calendar and could have led to holidays being celebrated at divergent times. Nadia systematically surveyed the evidence of reiterative calendars in medieval manuscripts, analyzed how they were constructed and used, and investigated their historical implications.

Before joining UCL in 2013, Dr. Vidro studied and worked in the University of Cambridge (2006–2013), where she specialized in the history of Hebrew linguistics and the transmission of grammatical knowledge between the Muslim and the Jewish cultures.