Khamseen Contributors

Sascha Crasnow (she/her) is Lecturer of Islamic Arts in the Residential College at the University of Michigan. She writes on global contemporary art practices, with a particular focus on SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa), race, socio-politics, gender, and sexuality. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the Journal of Visual Culture and Lateral. Her book project, The Age of Disillusionment: Palestinian Art After the Intifadas, is under review with Duke University Press.

See Sascha Crasnow’s videos:
Saba Taj’s Interstellar Uber // Negotiations with God: Queer Articulations in Contemporary Islamic Art
Al-Buraq

Layla S. Diba is an independent art advisor, scholar, and curator specializing in the art of 19th-and 20th-century Iran. She was the founding Director and Chief Curator of the Negarestan Museum in Tehran from 1975-78 and The Brooklyn Museum of Art’s Curator of Islamic Art from 1990-2000, where she organized the exhibition Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch (1785-1925). She is the author of numerous publications and essays on Persian and Islamic art, including Turkmen Silver (2011), as well as editor and co-editor of Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch (1785-1925) (1998) and Iran Modern (2013).

See Layla S. Diba’s video:
From the Miniature to the Monumental: The Negarestan Museum Painting of the Sons of Fath Ali Shah

Ashley Dimmig is the Crossman Gallery Director at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. There she oversees both the Crossman Gallery and the Community Engagement Center Gallery, and also teaches art history in the Department of Art and Design. After completing her PhD in the History of Art at the University of Michigan (2019), she held the position of Wieler-Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in Islamic Art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore where she curated the newly reinstalled permanent galleries of Islamic art within “Across Asia: Arts of Asia and the Islamic World” (opened April 2023). Her recent publications include chapters in the edited volumes Deconstructing Myths of Islamic Art (Routledge, 2022) and Textile in Architecture: From the Middle Ages to Modernism (Routledge, 2023). Dimmig’s research has been supported by various awards and fellowships including the Ittleson Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts (CASVA) and the Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi Fellowship in Ottoman Architectural Culture and History at the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED) in Istanbul. She also holds two Master of Art degrees from Indiana University Bloomington and Koç University in Istanbul, as well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Kansas City Art Institute.

See Ashley Dimmig’s video:
Islamic Art at the Walters Art Museum

Asa Eger (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2008) is Professor of the Islamic World  in the History Department at the University of North Carolina – Greensboro. He researches and teaches the Early and Medieval Mediterranean and Islamic Near East, focusing on the intersection of archaeology and history. Specifically, he studies frontiers, landscape archaeology, and environmental history in Anatolia and the Levant. He also works on gender and queer archaeology related to bathhouses in modern Istanbul and the Roman world. His recent books include Antioch: A History (2021), co-authored with Andrea U. de Giorgi, and The Islamic-Byzantine Frontier (2015), both recipients of the G. Ernest Wright book award from ASOR.

See Asa Eger’s video:
Hammam

Maryam Ekhtiar is Patti Cadby Birch Curator in the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is a specialist in nineteenth-century Persian art and culture, calligraphy, and later Persian painting. She co-edited the exhibition catalogue Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch 1785-1925 (1998), Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2011), and Art of the Islamic World: A Resource for Educators (2012). Her latest book, How to Read the Art of Islamic Calligraphy, was published in 2018, and her article “Ahl al-Bayt Imagery Revisited: A Drawing by Isma‘il Jalayir at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” is included in the volume Revealing the Unseen: New Perspectives on Qajar Art (2021).

See Maryam Ekhtiar’s video:
A Calligraphic Composition by Ismaʿil Jalayir in the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Farshid Emami (Ph.D. Harvard University, 2017) specializes in the history of architecture, urbanism, and the arts in the Islamic lands, with a focus on the early modern period and particularly Safavid Iran. His scholarly interests include global histories of early modernity, interactions of architecture and literature, social histories of the arts, and artistic exchange in the Persianate lands and beyond. His forthcoming book, Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran (Penn State University Press, Spring 2024), offers a new narrative of the architecture and urbanism of seventeenth-century Isfahan, the Safavid capital, through the analytical lens of urban experience. Emami’s studies of early modern Isfahan have been published in the Metropolitan Museum Journal (2019), Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies (2018), and Muqarnas (2016). He has also written on topics such as lithography in nineteenth-century Iran and modernist architecture and urbanism in the Middle East.

See Farshid Emami’s video:
Coffee and Coffeehouses in Ottoman and Safavid Lands, 1500-1800

Emine Fetvacı is Norma Jean Calderwood University Professor in Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College. She is the author of Picturing History at the Ottoman Court (Indiana University Press, 2013), and The Album of the World Emperor: Cross-Cultural Collecting and the Art of Album-Making In Seventeenth Century Istanbul (Princeton University Press, 2019), and the editor, with Erdem Çipa, of Writing History at the Ottoman Court (IUP, 2013). Among other venues, her articles have appeared in the Art Bulletin, Ars Orientalis, and Muqarnas. She has held a Stanford University Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship as well as been a member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

See Emine Fetvacı’s video:
Ottoman Illustrated Histories

Esther Voswinckel Filiz (Ph.D., Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 2020) is a researcher at the Orient-Institut in Istanbul. She studied Cultural Anthropology and Religious Studies in Bologna and Tübingen, with a focus on the anthropology of religion in the Mediterranean. She conducted field research in Üsküdar for several years for her doctoral thesis entitled “Aziz Mahmud Hüdayi in Istanbul: Biography of a Place,” published as a German-language book in 2022. Her research focuses on the material culture of Sufism in Istanbul, on the historical and contemporary aesthetics of saints’ tombs (türbe), and on the portable and textile paraphernalia therein. Her forthcoming publications include, among others, “Headgear” (with Semih Ceyhan) in Brill’s Handbook of Sufi Material Culture, and “Sufi Turbans in Istanbul: The Textile and Textual Production of the Tâc-ı Șerîf,” in The Politics of Dress and Identity in Eastern Mediterranean Societies, Past and Present.

See Esther Voswinckel Filiz’s video:
Turban

Yasemin Gencer is a scholar of Islamic art and civilization specializing in the history of Ottoman and modern Turkish art and print culture. She is the author of multiple articles on printing and the early Turkish Republican popular press and publishes a research and translation blog entitled Today in 1920s Turkey. Gencer is also preparing for publication her English translation of Celal Nuri’s Hatem ül-Enbiya (1914), an Ottoman Turkish scholarly monograph on the life of the Prophet Muhammad. She is an Affiliate Scholar at Indiana University’s Institute for Advanced Study and Content and Captions Coordinator of Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online. She also teaches Islamic Art History courses at Wayne State University.

See Yasemin Gencer’s videos:
İbrahim Müteferrika and the First Printed Books of the Islamic World
Mihrab

Sabiha Göloğlu is a post-doc university assistant at the University of Vienna’s Department of Art History. She was previously a research fellow of CAHIM (Connecting Art Histories in the Museum, 2018/2019), a joint research project of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz–Max-Planck-Institut and the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin–Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz. She received her PhD in Archaeology and History of Art from Koç University, Istanbul.

See Sabiha Göloğlu’s video:
Touching Mecca and Medina: The Dalā’il al-Khayrāt and Devotional Practices

Negar Habibi is an art historian, lecturer in Islamic and Iranian Art History and Soudavar Foundation fellow at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Her research focuses principally on paintings from early modern Iran. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, her academic work centers on the artists’ career and life, the authenticity of their signature, gender issues and artistic patronage. She has published several articles on the art and artists of late seventeenth-century in Iran, and her book titled ʿAli Qoli Jebādār et l’occidentalisme safavide: une étude sur les peintures dites farangi sāzi, leurs milieux et commanditaires sous Shah Soleimān(1666-94) was published by Brill in 2018.

See Negar Habibi’s videos:
The Depiction of European Women in Late Safavid Paintings
Farangi

Kerr Houston is a professor of art history, theory and criticism at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he has taught since 2002. His scholarship focuses primarily on Italian Renaissance visual culture and contemporary art and art criticism, but he also teaches courses on Islamic art and architecture and the history of aesthetics. He is the author of two books—An Introduction to Art Criticism and The Place of the Viewer: The Embodied Beholder in the History of Art, 1764-1968—and numerous articles. He also served as the editor of Art Inquiries from 2017 to 2020.

See Kerr Houston’s video:
Arabesque
Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis

Ruba Kana‘an teaches Islamic art and architecture at the University of Toronto. Her research and publications focus on the intersections between art, artists, art production, and law in Muslim contexts. She is author of multiple articles on inlaid metalwork portable objects dating to the twelfth  and thirteenth centuries, and the forthcoming book The Friday Mosque: Law, Architecture, and Authority in Pre-Modern Muslim Societies (Edinburgh University Press). Her experience spans the worlds of academia, museums, architectural practice, and community-based art education.

See Ruba Kana‘an’s video:
The Bobrinski Bucket

Sumru Belger Krody joined The Textile Museum in 1994, after receiving her undergraduate and graduate degrees in classical archaeology from Istanbul University and the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Her research area is textiles from the late antique through the early modern period in the Islamic lands, with special focus on the influence of textile techniques and structures on iconography, as well as the social and economic power of textiles. She also serves as editor-in-chief of The Textile Museum Journal. She is the author of several books and many articles on textiles arts.

See Sumru Belger Krody’s video: 
Prayer Carpets

Evyn Kropf is a librarian and curator of Islamic manuscripts at the University of Michigan Library. As a specialist of Islamic codicology and Arabic manuscript culture, her particular interests include writing material (especially paper), structural repairs, reading and collecting practices of the Ottoman era as well as the significance of pictograms and other visual content for Sufi knowledge transmission. Her recent publications include, among others, “Recalling Alikurna: “ليكوريا” Countermarked Paper among Scribes in the Late 19th Century Ottoman Levant,” In The Trade in Papers Marked with Non-Latin Characters (Brill, 2018) and “‘Sensible Metaphors’: Pictograms in the Transmission of ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Shaʽrānī’s (d.973/1565) al-Mīzān al-kubrá,” In Visualizing Sufism (Brill, 2022).

See Evyn Kropf’s video:
Colophon

Linda Komaroff (PhD, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, 1984) is Curator of Islamic Art and Department Head, Art of the Middle East, at LACMA. She has organized various exhibitions on Islamic art as well as contemporary Middle East art, among them The Legacy of Genghis Khan: Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia, 1256–1353 (2002-03), Gifts of the Sultan: The Arts of Giving at the Islamic Courts (2011-12), In the Fields of Empty Days: The Intersection of Past and Present in Iranian Art (2018); she is currently working on Women Defining Women in Contemporary Art of the Middle East and Beyond (2023) and Dining with the Sultan: The Fine Art of Feasting (2024). She is the author or editor of several books and exhibition catalogues, and has written numerous articles and book chapters on Islamic and contemporary Middle East art.

See Linda Komaroff’s video:
On a Tinned Copper Bowl and Designs on Paper

Richard McClary (Ph.D., University of Edinburgh, 2015) is a lecturer in Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of York. His first monograph, entitled Rum Seljuq Architecture 1170-1220: The Patronage of Sultans was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2017, and his second, Medieval Monuments of Central Asia. Qarakhanid Architecture of the 11th and 12th Centuries, also with EUP, appeared in press in 2020. He has co-edited a volume with Andrew Peacock, entitled Turkish History and Culture in India, Identity, Art and Transregional Connections (Brill, 2020), as well as numerous articles and book chapters on the topic of medieval Islamic architecture and ceramics. He is also a trustee and the Research Director for the British Institute of Persian Studies.

See Richard McClary’s videos:
Mina’i
Hazar-baf

Richard McGregor is Associate Professor of Religion and Islamic Studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. His primary field of research is medieval Egypt and Syria, with a focus on religious thought, ritual, and Sufism. His most recent book, Islam and the Devotional Object: Seeing Religion in Egypt and Syria (2020), explores the lives of a series of religious objects. He also works on the devotional gaze, in theory and historical Islamic practice.

See Richard McGregor’s videos:
Hajj Materials and Rites from Egypt
Kiswa
Mahmal

Leslee Katrina Michelsen (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is a Board Member and Programs Committee Co-Chair at ICOM-US. From 2017-2023 she was the Senior Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design in Honolulu, where she led the team responsible for the exhibition, interpretation, research, and conservation of the museum’s collection of historic and contemporary arts of the Islamic world. She was also the Head of the Curatorial and Research Section at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar from 2011-2016, and has worked on numerous cultural heritage and archaeology projects throughout Central Asia, South Asia, and East Africa. She is a specialist of materiality and making from the historic to the contemporary periods in Central and South Asia, and of myriad mediums ranging from architecture to ceramics to textiles. She also explores contemporary museology of the arts of the Islamic world, and serves on the Steering Committee of Steppe Sisters as well as the museum grantmaking initiatives of the National Endowment for the Arts.

See Leslee Michelsen’s videos:
Jali
Pishtaq

Heba Mostafa is Assistant Professor of Islamic art and architecture at the Department of History of Art at the University of Toronto. She received her doctorate from Cambridge University’s Department of Architecture in 2012. Her research focuses on Islam’s interface with late antiquity, Christianity and Judaism through commemorative architecture, pilgrimage, and ritual practice, with a particular focus on Jerusalem and Cairo.

See Heba Mostafa’s videos:
The Dome of the Rock: Original Mosaics
Qubba

Atefeh Seyed Mousavi received her Ph.D. from the University of Göttingen, Germany, in 2018. She previously worked as a lecturer of Islamic art history and architecture at Georg August University of Göttingen. Her research focuses principally on the visual and material culture of Iran from the early modern period to today. During extensive fieldwork in Shiraz, Dr. Mousavi wrote a catalog of the art of narrative tile painting. She also has published several articles on popular Iranian artworks and artists from the late 18^th to the early 20^th century, and her 2018 book, which was supported by a Barakat Trust grant, is entitled Narrative Illustration on Qajar Tilework in Shiraz.

See Atefeh Seyed Mousavi’s video:
Haft Rang

Harry Munt is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of York. His interests include Islamic ideas about pilgrimage and sacred places and the history of the Arabian Peninsula as well as early Islamic history and history-writing more broadly. He is the author of several articles on these topics as well as the monograph The Holy City of Medina: Sacred Space in Early Islamic Arabia (Cambridge: Cambridge, University Press, 2014).

See Harry Munt’s video:
Haram

Mika Natif is Associate Professor of Art History at the George Washington University. Her scholarly work focuses on the intercultural exchanges and global connections that Muslim societies forged with Europe during the premodern era. She is the author of Mughal Occidentalism: Artistic Encounters Between Europe and Asia at the Courts of India, 1580-1630 (Leiden: Brill, 2018). Her current research explores notions of images, diversity and religious tolerance in the arts of Mughal India, female portraiture, and the role of women as patrons and artists in pre-modern Persiante spheres.

See Mika Natif’s videos:
Simurgh
Images of the Virgin Mary in Mughal Art (Coming Soon)

Emily Neumeier is Assistant Professor of Art History at Temple University. Her research concerns the art and architecture of the Eastern Mediterranean, particularly of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic.

See Emily Neumeier’s video:
The Paintings of Osman Hamdi Bey

Erin Hyde Nolan (Ph.D., Boston University) is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bates College and Lecturer at Tufts University. Her research focuses on photographic history and visual culture from the Islamic world, especially the circulation of images and ways that lens-based technology connects continents, countries, and cultures. She is the co-author, with Sophie Junge, of Survey Practices and Landscape Photography Across the Globe (Routledge, 2022), and she also has published essays in Ars Orientalis and Trans Asia Photography. Her scholarship has been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, Kunsthistorisches Institut-Florenz, Max-Planck Society, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Historians of Islamic Art Association, and Getty Research Institute.

See Erin Hyde Nolan’s video:
Ottoman Costume Portraits: Photographs in the Elbise-i Osmaniyye

Bernard O’Kane is a professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at The American University in Cairo. He has also been a visiting professor at Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley. He has authored several books including The Mosques of Egypt, The Illustrated Guide to the Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo, Timurid Architecture in Khurasan and Mosques: the 100 Most Iconic Islamic Houses of Worship. O’Kane is also an avid photographer. He recently directed the creation of the The Monumental Inscriptions of Cairo database featuring searchable and translated transcriptions of epigraphy on Cairo’s historic monuments.

See Bernard O’Kane’s video:
The Khanqah of Baybars al-Jashinkir, 1306-1310

Simon O’Meara is a Lecturer in Islamic art history at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has a methodological interest in using the discourses of Islam to explore Islamic visuality and understand what scholarship can struggle to accommodate or see. His most recent book is entitled The Ka‘ba Orientations: Readings in Islam’s Ancient House (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

See Simon O’Meara’s video:
Kaʿba

Keelan Overton (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 2011) is a historian of art and architecture specializing in the eastern Islamic world. Her publications explore the historiography of Islamic art, purveying of Iran’s cultural heritage, life histories of manuscripts and buildings, and cultural relations between Iran and the Deccan. She is editor of Iran and the Deccan: Persianate Art, Culture, and Talent in Circulation, 1400–1700 (2020) and Director/Curator of The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin: An Online Exhibition of a Living Iranian Shrine. Her publications on the latter site include “Framing, Performing, Forgetting: The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin” (2022) and, with Kimia Maleki, “The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin: A Present History of a Living Shrine, 2018–20” (2020).

See Keelan Overton’s video:
Persian Luster Tilework between the Field and Museum

Rachel Parikh is the Marguerite S. Hoffman and Thomas W. Lentz Curator of Islamic Art at the Dallas Museum of Art. She also serves as the Deputy Director for the Dunhuang Foundation. Parikh specializes in South Asian and Islamic painting as well as arms and armor. Prior to her current positions, Parikh worked at the Worcester Art Museum; Harvard Art Museums; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Art Institute of Chicago. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. Parikh has lectured nationally and internationally, as well as published extensively. Her first book, The Khalili Falnamah, was published in 2022. You can follow her arms and armor Instagram account.

See Rachel Parikh’s videos:
Painting the Royal Hunt in India: A Prince on Horseback Hunting a Lion
Islamic Arms and Armor: Dhu’l Fiqar, ʿAli’s Miraculous Sword
Talisman

Amanda Phillips received her DPhil at Oxford and now teaches Islamic art and material culture at the University of Virginia. She focuses mostly on craft traditions in the Ottoman Empire, and especially textiles and other things made outside the palace. Art and objects are the main topic of her first book Everyday Luxuries (2016). Her second book, Sea Change (2021), argues that textiles twined through every facet of life in the Ottoman Empire, and their study reveals not only the preoccupations and habits of elite and humble subjects alike, but also frameworks of piety, economic thought, collective taste-making, and sensory experience not found in written sources.

See Amanda Phillips’ videos:
Silk
Velvet
Loom

Stéphane Pradines is an archaeologist and Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (AKU-ISMC) in London. He served as Director of the excavations of the Fatimid and Ayyubid Walls of Cairo, as well as a number of other excavations in the Indian Ocean (Maldives) and East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Comoros). He is a specialist of medieval trade in the Indian Ocean and the material culture of war in Muslim Africa, especially arms and military architecture. His most recent book is entitled Historic Mosques in Sub-Saharan Africa, from Timbuktu to Zanzibar (Brill, 2021).

See Stéphane Pradines’ video:
Swahili Mosques Between Sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian Ocean

Jennifer Pruitt is the Howard and Ellen Louise Schwartz associate professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Her first book, Building the Caliphate: Construction, Destruction, and Sectarian Identity in Early Fatimid Architecture (Yale University Press, 2020) investigates the early architecture of the Fatimids, an Ismaili Shi‘i Muslim dynasty that dominated the Mediterranean world from the 10th to the 12th centuries. She is currently writing a second book, Inheriting an Islamic Golden Age: Globalism, National Identity, and Invented Histories in the Architecture of the Arabian Gulf, which investigates the integration of classical forms of Islamic art in the contemporary architecture of the Arabian Gulf.

See Jennifer Pruitt’s video:
Al-Aqmar Mosque

Elizabeth Rauh (PhD, University of Michigan, 2020) is an art historian and curator of Islamic art history. Her research examines the history of modern artist experiments with Islamic heritage, popular image practices in Shi`i Islam, and the creative dimensions of the “Shi`i Left” during the 20th century. She also explores ecological art practices in Iraq and the Persian Gulf; this subject forms the focus of her forthcoming article: “Experiments in Eden: Midcentury Artist Voyages into the Mesopotamian Marshlands,” Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World (March 2021).

See Elizabeth Rauh’s video:
A Hot Wind Blows: Ecocritical Art in the Middle East

Yael Rice is associate professor of art history at Amherst College. She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in the art and architecture of South Asia, Central Asia, and Iran, with a particular focus on manuscripts and other portable arts of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries.

See Yael Rice’s video:
Jahangir’s Dream
Kitabkhana

Mariam Rosser-Owen has been a curator in the Middle Eastern Section at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London, since 2002. She specializes in the arts of the Arab world, in particular the Islamic Mediterranean and North Africa. She has a D.Phil. in Islamic Art and Archaeology from the University of Oxford, and is the author of Islamic Arts from Spain (V&A, 2010). She has written widely on ivory, and her book Articulating the Ḥijāba: Cultural Patronage and Political Legitimacy in al-Andalus. The ʿĀmirid Regency c.970-1010 AD was published in Brill’s Handbook of Oriental Studies series in 2021.

See Mariam Rosser-Owen’s videos:
Ivories from Islamic Spain
Lustreware (Coming Soon)

Ünver Rüstem is the Second Decade Society Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Johns Hopkins University. His research centers on the Ottoman Empire in its later centuries and on questions of cross-cultural exchange and interaction. He is the author of Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Princeton University Press, 2019) and has published articles and chapters on topics ranging from the reception of illustrated Islamic manuscripts to the funerary art of Ottoman Cyprus. At present, he is working on a new book project that explores the role of costume in Ottoman interactions with Western Europe during the early modern and modern periods.

See Ünver Rüstem’s videos:
The Nuruosmaniye Mosque and the Ottoman Baroque
Tughra

Marika Sardar is an independent scholar who has held curatorial positions at the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, the San Diego Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Major exhibitions include Interwoven Globe (2013), focusing on the worldwide textile trade from the 16th-18th century; Sultans of Deccan India, 1500-1750 (2015), examining the artistic traditions of the Muslim sultanates of central India; and Epic Tales from Ancient India (2016), looking at narrative traditions and the illustration of texts from South Asia. 

See Marika Sardar’s videos:
A Samanid Epigraphic Dish
The Gwalior Qur’an
Frontispiece

Mira Xenia Schwerda (PhD, 2020, Harvard University) is a historian of modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art, specifically print and photography. As a Getty/ACLS postdoctoral fellow in the history of art, she is currently at work on her book manuscript-in-progress, tentatively titled Between Art and Propaganda: Photographing Revolution in Modern Iran (1905–1911). Translation and cross-cultural contact play a key role in her work, she has published her academic work in both English and Persian, and is the co-editor of the journal Art in Translation. Dr. Schwerda has worked at the Harvard Art Museums, where she curated the photography section of the exhibition Technologies of the Image: Art in 19th-Century Iran and is the co-founder of the Virtual Islamic Art History Seminar Series. She has taught courses in the history of photography, Islamic art history, and South Asian art history in the Department of Art History at the University of Edinburgh. She is a founding member and the managing director of Khamseen.

See Mira Xenia Schwerda’s video:
Minaret
Bryce Qur’an (coming soon)

Alex Dika Seggerman is Associate Professor of Islamic Art History in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at Rutgers University-Newark. She is the author of Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt between the Islamic and the Contemporary (UNC Press, 2019) and co-editor of Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean (Indiana University Press, 2022).

See Alex Dika Seggerman’s videos:
Mahmoud Mukhtar’s Khamasin: Sculpture in Modern Egypt
Orientalism

Amanda Hannoosh Steinberg is the Librarian for Islamic Art and Architecture at the Harvard Fine Arts Library, where she manages the library’s world class collection of books, photographs, and other rare items for teaching Islamic art. Her PhD work focused on women in medieval Arabic popular literature, and she previously worked as a Middle East Studies Librarian and as a Visual Resources Librarian. She holds a certificate from Harvard’s Copyright First Responders program and has been the image consultant for Muqarnas journal since 2018. She is the Images and Copyright Coordinator of Khamseen. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram.

See Amanda Hannoosh Steinberg’s video:
Harvard Fine Arts Library’s Stuart Cary Welch Islamic and South Asian Photograph Collection

Melis Taner is an Assistant Professor at Özyeğin University, Istanbul. She specializes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ottoman and Safavid manuscripts. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2016. Her book, Caught in a Whirlwind: A Cultural History of Ottoman Baghdad as Reflected in its Illustrated Manuscripts (2019), looks at the artistic production in the frontier province of Baghdad. She is currently working on illustrated manuscripts of botany and zoology, looking at interactions between Europe and the Ottoman lands, as well as at the intersection of art and nature.

See Melis Taner’s video:
Contextualizing the Hünername (Book of Talents)

Denise-Marie Teece is an art historian specializing in the art and architecture of the Islamic world and transregional artistic exchange. Assistant Professor of Art History at New York University Abu Dhabi since 2014, she also taught coursework at New York University in New York City. Prior to joining NYUAD, she worked for seven years in the Department of Islamic Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She also has held positions at the Brooklyn Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, and she served as a curatorial consultant to the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto. Her current projects include a study of the Gulf and Indian Ocean World reception of Chinese porcelains, and the preparation of a website dedicated to this theme.

See Denise-Marie Teece’s video:
Monsoon Winds and Ming Porcelains: Collecting and Displaying Chinese Ceramics at the Mughal Court

Ayşe Hilal Uğurlu is Associate Professor of architectural history at MEF University, Istanbul. Her research interests include Ottoman social, political and architectural history, especially of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She co-edited a book with Hatice Aynur entitled Osmanlı Mimarlık Kültürü (Ottoman Architectural Culture) and two books with Suzan Yalman, Sacred Spaces and Urban Networks and The Friday Mosque in the City: Liminality, Ritual, Politics. Her academic work has been supported by the Barakat Trust, ANAMED of Koç University, Salt Research, and Istanbul Research Institute.

See Ayşe Hilal Uğurlu’s video:
Külliye

Valentina Vezzoli is currently research fellow at the Department of Arabic, Medieval and Modern Studies of the Institut Français du Proche Orient in Beirut. She received her PhD at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her research focuses on the study of material culture and human landscape in the Middle East during the Islamic period, with a special focus on the distribution and production of ceramic objects. She also explores cultural and economic interactions between the Islamic world and the Mediterranean.

See Valentina Vezzoli’s video:
Sphero-Conical Vessels: Evidence from Baalbek (Lebanon)

Elizabeth Dospěl Williams is Curator of the Byzantine Collection at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Her exhibitions include Woven Interiors: Furnishing Early Medieval Egypt (in collaboration with the Textile Museum, 2019-20), Ornament: Fragments of Byzantine Fashion (2019-20), and Rich in Blessings: Women, Wealth and the Late Antique Household (2023-4). She received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, focusing on jewelry, dress practices, and attitudes towards adornment in the Byzantine and early Islamic periods.

See Elizabeth Dospěl Williams’s video:
Craft and Aesthetics in Byzantine and Early Islamic Textiles

Meredyth Lynn Winter (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2020), is a specialist of medieval Islamic material culture and craft. She is currently Mellon Curatorial Post-Doctoral Fellow in Costume & Textiles at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2021-2024, and has been appointed Lecturer in Early Islamic Arts at the Courtauld Institute. Recent publications include her collaboration on the Harvard Art Museums exhibition catalog of Islamic tiraz textiles, Social Fabrics: Inscribed Textiles from Medieval Egyptian Tombs, eds. M. McWilliams and J. Sokoly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2021).

See Meredyth Lynn Winter’s videos:
Khilʿa
Tiraz

Caroline “Olivia” Wolf is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Loyola University Chicago, where her teaching and research focuses on art and architecture from a global perspective, with emphasis on Latin America, the Middle East, and diasporic intersections. Her work has been supported by a Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellowship and the Society of Architectural Historians, among others. Wolf was a Visiting Scholar at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (2019), a Camfield Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2013-2014), and received her PhD at Rice University.

See Caroline “Olivia“ Wolf’s video:
Monumental Mosques in Latin America: Key Modern and Contemporary Case Studies

Sylvia Wu is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. A historian of medieval Islamic art and architecture, she is particularly interested in the material culture of China’s Muslim communities and their devotional practices. In her dissertation, “Mosques of Elsewhere: Tale and Survival of Muslim Monuments in Coastal China,” she examines a medieval and a modern moment in the history of China’s mosque building tradition and seeks to understand the roles that local and global actors have played in shaping the mosques’ changing identities.

See Sylvia Wu’s (Graduate Student Presentation Award 2022 Recipient) video:
The Ashab Mosque in Quanzhou: A Coastal Mosque in South China

Ayşin Yoltar-Yıldırım, Norma Jean Calderwood Curator of Islamic and Later Indian Art at the Harvard Art Museums, received her MA and PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her interests include arts of the book from the Persian and Ottoman realms as well as the history of Islamic art collections. She has recently completed the reinstallation of the Arts of the Islamic World gallery at the Brooklyn Museum (2022). Previously she curated  “A New Light on Bernard Berenson: Persian Paintings from Villa I Tatti” (2017, Harvard Art Museums) and “Syria, Then and Now: Stories from Refugees a Century Apart” (2018, Brooklyn Museum).

See Ayşin Yoltar-Yıldırım’s video:
The Birth Scene of Iskandar (Alexander the Great)