[2] She is the Vice-President of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies and a Member of the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics.
[3] She then attended Somerville College at Oxford, where she studied Arabic and Turkish.
[5] Her thesis, The history of the Jazira 1100–1150: the contribution of Ibn Al-Azraq al-Fariqi,[6] analysed and translated a pair of British Library manuscripts of a text by the 12th-century Artuqid historian ibn al-Azraq al-Fariqi.
Her research interests include: the Crusades; Islamic political thought; medieval and modern concepts of jihad; Arabic and Persian travel literature.
Invited by an interviewer in 2018 to venture an opinion on whether the Muslims who had encountered westerners in the Holy Land during the time of the crusades had seen the best of Western Christendom in their midst, Hillenbrand agreed that - with notable and distinguished exceptions - they almost certainly had not: "The most important thing that most of the crusaders who remained in the Holy Land learned ... was to use soap".