Dr. Krisztina Ilko

Biography

Krisztina Ilko holds a Junior Research Fellowship at Queens' College and serves as an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge. She specializes in the Global Middle Ages, particularly before 1500, and is currently researching and writing a book titled 'Pawns in History: A New Approach to the Global Middle Ages.' This work explores how chess serves as a form of cross-cultural communication in the Afro-Eurasian world from 800 to 1400, addressing globalization in the medieval period and its implications for contemporary discussions about the Middle Ages. Additionally, her article 'Chess Race in the Global Middle Ages' was published in Speculum in 2024. Before her current role, Ilko was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford, and she completed her PhD as a Lander Scholar at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. She has also spent years as a Predoctoral Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, focusing on social and environmental history in High Medieval Italy and the Global Middle Ages, as well as materiality and race-thinking in chess.

Research Interests