Madhumita is a second-year PhD student in the Department of History. Her current project looks at the business correspondence of medieval Jewish traders in the Indian Ocean. By focusing particularly on the textile industry in the Cairo Geniza, Madhumita analyses the nexus between economy and law in the medieval marketplace. Before arriving at UVA, Madhumita earned her second master’s degree in Religion via the Jewish Studies Program at Vanderbilt University. Her thesis, Debt in the Geniza: ‘Witnessing’ Silences in the Jewish Credit System Through Legal Documents in Medieval Egypt C.1000-1150 CE, looked at the fragmented silences in the Geniza legal texts that pointed to the gap between the normative laws and the actual economic practices of the time.