Maria Mavroudi, Assistant Professor of History, is a specialist in the Byzantine era. Her year as a Townsend Center Fellow will facilitate the writing of a book tentatively titled Bilingualism in Greek and Arabic in the Middle Ages: Evidence from the Manuscripts, which will explore the survival of literacy in Greek throughout the Middle East during the centuries after the Arab conquest. Making reference to the institutions and mechanisms that aided this survival, Mavroudi’s work will concentrate on religious, scientific, and philological manuscripts, incorporating an extensive discussion and edition of a rare Greek-to-Arabic dictionary that she has identified in two manuscripts, from the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries, respectively. The book will also include a CD-ROM edition of these manuscripts, allowing users to examine the format and visual appearance of the dictionary. Not only will this publication discuss significant issues in the cultural history of Byzantium, but it will also provide an interdisciplinary bridge between fields, such as Byzantine and Middle Eastern Studies and philology and cultural history, that traditionally operate in relative isolation from each other.