Rosie Maxton is a doctoral student at Oxford University. She holds an MA in Arabic and Medieval History from St. Andrews University, and an MPhil in Middle Eastern Studies from Cambridge University. 
Her current research explores conversion to the Catholic faith among Eastern Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire, focusing on the town of Mardin (present-day southeast Turkey) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through examining the corpus of Arabic and Syriac manuscripts produced and procured by Mardin’s Christian communities during this period, her research seeks to analyse the ways in which conversion to Catholicism was expressed, and thereby to further our understanding of the intricacies of Catholic expansion in the early modern world. 
During her fellowship at the OIB, she will investigate the connection between Eastern Catholic communities in Lebanon and Mardin in the eighteenth century, primarily through the medium of scribal culture.