She is retired as Professor of the History of Islamic Science at the University of Oxford, where she continues to be Fellow Archivist of St Cross College, Oxford and a senior research consultant for the Bodleian Library.[1][2] She is the president of the Society for the History of Medieval Technology and Science.[4] Before moving to the Oriental Institute at the University of Oxford she was a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the Gustave E. von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies and in the Medical History Division of the Department of Anatomy.
Lost Maps of the Caliphs: Drawing the World in Eleventh-Century Cairo (with Yossef Rapoport, University of Chicago Press, 2018)[5]
Medieval Islamic Medicine (with Peter E. Pormann, Edinburgh University Press, 2007)[6]
Medieval Views of the Cosmos (with Evelyn Edson, Bodleian Library, 2004)[7]
Islamicate Celestial Globes: Their History, Construction, and Use (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985)[8]
Islamic Geomancy and a Thirteenth-Century Divinatory Device (with M. B. Smith, Undena Press, 1980)[9]
Additionally, she has contributed as an editor or translator to multiple other books including critical editions of works from the medieval Islamic world, edited volumes, and catalogues of collections.[2]
In 2014, DePauw University gave her an honorary doctorate.[2][10] In 2016, the Scientific Instrument Society chose Savage-Smith as their Gerard Turner Memorial Lecturer and gave her the Turner Medal.[2][11] A workshop in honour of her career and contributions to the history of Islamic science, Health, Magic and Stars: Workshop on the history of Islamic science, was held at Oxford in 2019.[12]
Her book Medieval Islamic Medicine was one of three 2008 winners of the British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize.[13]
