New Podcast Series “Digital Al-Andalus: On the Record” – Imaginations of Al-Andalus and How History Returns in the Present
By Cristina Moreno Almeida and Hanan Natour
What do we really mean when we speak of “Al-Andalus”? Was medieval Iberia a model of coexistence, a lost paradise, or something far more complex? How do historians find people and ideas that barely appear in the official record? And how do political and cultural actors today reach back to remember, romanticise, or instrumentalise the medieval past for political mobilisation?
Louie Dean Valencia, Irene Fernández-Ramos, and Cristina Moreno-Almeida during the Lightning Round of Digital Al-Andalus: On the Record. Photo by The Lens Box (@thelensbox)
These are some of the questions addressed in the recently launched podcast series “Digital Al-Andalus: On the Record” hosted by the ERC-selected, UKRI-funded project “Digital Al-Andalus: Radical Perspectives Of and Through Al-Andalus” under the lead of Cristina Moreno Almeida at Queen Mary University of London. Located at the nexus of history, culture, politics, and communication, the interdisciplinary Digital Humanities project explores how the historical legacy of Al-Andalus, the eight-century Muslim rule over the Iberian Peninsula (711–1492), is reshaped and weaponised in today’s digital landscape. Bridging research on radicalism, digital media, and historical memory, it examines how online communities manipulate the past to justify contemporary conflicts. It goes beyond the study of Al-Andalus as a historical period and instead focuses on the presence of its imaginations, and how digital echoes of our past continue to reshape our contemporary world.
As such, it deals with questions that reach far beyond the context of Al-Andalus itself: In what ways is history being rewritten, debated, and distorted? What can our role as scholars, readers, teachers, and listeners be as part of this evolving conversation in which social cohesion is questioned, and in which digital worlds increasingly blur the line between reality and fiction? In times in which humanity is questioned, in which fake news impact geo-political debates, it takes a closer look at how historical narratives return in the present and holds valuable insights into the mechanisms and the interests that lie behind words. Al-Andalus, and its digital life today, thus serves as a methodological lens that can also be applied to other historical contexts.
The podcast series features two complementary formats. The first brings together leading experts to explore how Al-Andalus and the past more broadly is remembered, reimagined, debated, and mobilised in today’s media, politics, and culture. Each long-form conversation concludes with a playful Lightning Round, where guests are challenged to distinguish between quotes from historical figures and those from pop stars, politicians, or internet culture, revealing surprising continuities across time.
Alongside these interviews, the section Bytes offers short, engaging episodes presented by members of the Digital Al-Andalus team. Each episode explores a single idea, historical figure, or contemporary controversy, from bringing figures such as Tariq ibn Ziyad and Ibn Khaldun back to life, to unpacking folklore reenactments, digital myths, and political debates surrounding the so-called Reconquista. Together, these “bite-sized” episodes show how medieval histories continue to shape contemporary culture, media, and public discourse.
The first three episodes cover a range of topics, from historical engagements with the controversies around terms like “convivencia” and “recoquista” to how political actors today instrumentalise the historical period of Al-Andalus to serve their respective purposes.
In the first episode, Cristina Moreno-Almeida speaks with historian Eduardo Manzano Moreno, Research Professor at the Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), about the historical realities of Al-Andalus and the many ways it has been remembered, romanticised, and politically mobilised over time. Together they explore coexistence and conflict in medieval Iberia, the limits of the idea of “convivencia,” and why simplified versions of the past continue to resonate today. Who is Tariq ibn Ziyad, and why does he still matter today? Which powers ruled Iberia in the Middle Ages, and how does their encounter still resonate in the present? How does the historical heritage and the way we remember it shape identities today?
The second episode features medieval historian Delfi Nieto-Isabel and tackles the question of how and why certain historical figures are remembered, while others disappear from the historical record. She explains how historians recover hidden histories and speaks about the digital tools helping scholars uncover overlooked histories. How did ideas travel across the medieval Mediterranean? Why are rumours and misinformation older than we might think? And how can we avoid reproducing distorted historical narratives today?
The third interview was conducted with Director of the Public History Program and the Texas Center for Public History (TCPH) at Texas State University, Louie Dean Valencia. He speaks about the construction of alternative histories, and what they mean for us in the present. How do far-right groups manipulate memory? How does nostalgia play into these dynamics? And what does all of this mean in the context of social mobilisation by political actors across the world?
Another set of episodes will be published this fall, including long-form interviews with Rosa Vidal Doval, Professor at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford; Shakuntala Banaji, Professor of Media, Culture and Social Change in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics (LSE); and Eric Calderwood, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. These episodes will continue to showcase the project´s key concerns and touch upon the importance of knowing how platforms work, contemporary resonances of medieval issues such as “limpieza de sangre” (blood purity), and cultural afterlives of Al-Andalus today.
Combined, these episodes explore Al-Andalus as a starting point to thinking about the intersection between history, politics, and digital culture, providing vivid examples of how history shapes societal controversies today. The podcast is published across all streaming platforms and can also be followed on social media @DigitalAl-Andalus – stay tuned not to miss any episodes and join the conversation.
About the Authors:
Dr Cristina Moreno-Almeida is Senior Lecturer in Digital Culture at Queen Mary University of London. She leads the ERC-selected, UKRI-funded Digital Al-Andalus project, which examines how narratives of Al-Andalus circulate online, bringing together historical memory, nostalgia for lost empires, politicised identities, and digital cultures of conflict. Her research explores digital culture, aesthetics, and politics, with a focus on online cultural production. She is the author of Rap Beyond Resistance: Staging Power in Contemporary Morocco (Palgrave, 2017) and Memes, Monsters, and the Digital Grotesque (OUP, 2024). She is also co-editor of the Global Digital Futures book series at University of Exeter Press.
Hanan Natour is a German-Palestinian scholar of Arabic and Comparative Literature and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Queen Mary University of London. As part of the Digital Al-Andalus team, she explores literary entanglements between Iberia and the Maghreb, adopting a transhistorical approach to narratives of loss and empowerment between Granada and Kairouan. Hanan obtained her PhD in Arabic and Literary Studies with a thesis on narratives of liberation, emancipation, and decoloniality in modern Tunisian fiction at Freie Universität Berlin, co-supervised at the University of Oxford (2024). Together with Mohamed-Salah Omri she edited the first English-language volume devoted to the varieties of modern Tunisian literatures, Tunisian Literatures – Multilingual Realities, Genealogies, Testimonies (Bloomsbury, 2026). In the academic years 2025–27, Hanan is an affiliated EUME Fellow.
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Citation: Cristina Moreno Almeida and Hanan Natour. New Podcast Series “Digital Al-Andalus: On the Record” -Imaginations of Al-Andalus and How History Returns in the Present . TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 4.08.2026, from https://trafo.hypotheses.org/?p=67095
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Forum Transregionale Studien (August 4, 2026). New Podcast Series “Digital Al-Andalus: On the Record” – Imaginations of Al-Andalus and How History Returns in the Present . TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved September 11, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/16ngl
