Khamseen Contributors

Sascha Crasnow (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Drake University. Her research focuses on contemporary art from the SWANA region, with a particular interest in how artists respond to their socio-political conditions, race, gender & 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
Decolonization (Coming soon)

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) is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at Rice University. He specializes in the history of Islamic architecture, urbanism, and the arts, with a focus on the early modern period and Safavid Iran. He is the author of Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran (Penn State University Press, 2024). His scholarly interests include transregional histories of early modernity, social experiences of architecture and urban spaces, and the intersections of architecture and literature. In addition to his publications on Safavid art and architecture, he has 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: English, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, French, German, Hebrew

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

William Gallois is Professor of the Islamic Mediterranean and Director of the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Qayrawān: The Amuletic City (Penn State University Press, 2024) as well as a series of recent articles that explore lost histories of Islamic art from the colonial era.

See William Gallois’ video:
Mural Painting in Colonial Tunisia, ca. 1900 CE

Yasemin Gencer is a Pre-Faculty Fellow in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design at Wayne State University. She is a scholar of Islamic art and civilization specializing in the history of Ottoman and modern Turkish art and print culture. She has authored a number of articles on printing and the early Turkish Republican popular press, and she regularly writes a research and translation blog entitled Today in 1920s Turkey. Gencer is currently preparing for publication her English translation of Celal Nuri’s Hatem ül-Enbiya (Seal of the Prophets), an Ottoman Turkish scholarly monograph on the Prophet Muhammad written in 1914 CE.

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

Kambiz GhaneaBassiri is Professor of Religion at Carleton College. He is the author of A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and co-editor, with Anna Bigelow, of a special issue of the MAVCOR Journal on Material Islam (2022). GhaneaBassiri is currently working on a book project exploring The Mosque in Islamic History. He is also the author of numerous articles and book chapters on the material culture, lived histories, and theological discourses of Muslims in the Middle East, South Asia, and North America in both the formative and modern periods of Islamic history.

See Kambiz GhaneaBassiri’s video:
Wudu

Sabiha Göloğlu is a postdoctoral university assistant at the University of Vienna’s Department of Art History. Between 2021 and 2024, she held a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Global Fellowship at the University of Hamburg and the University of Michigan. Among others, her publications include an article in Muqarnas about a late Ottoman canvas painting of Mecca and Medina and exchanges between photography, painting, and print media; she has written about the talismanic use of hand-executed and printed images of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem in prayer manuscripts; and she co-edited a special double issue of the Journal of Islamic Manuscripts on Sulayman al-Jazuli’s (d. 870/1465) Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt (Proofs of Good Deeds). Dr. Göloğlu is currently finalizing her monograph entitled The House of God and the Tomb of the Prophet: Images of Mecca and Medina in the Ottoman Empire (16th–19th Century).

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

Negar Habibi (Ph.D., Aix-Marseille University) is Lecturer in Iranian Studies at the University of Geneva, funded by the Mohammad Mossadegh Foundation. Her research focuses on Persian painting from the pre-modern and modern periods, as well as the collection and reception of Persian art in 20th-century France. She is the author of the 2018 monograph ʿAli Qoli Jebādār et l’occidentalisme safavide: une étude sur les peintures dites farangi sāzi, leurs milieux et commanditaires sous Shah Soleimān (1666-94). In 2021, she published Shâhnâmeh de Ferdowsi: Le livre des rois persans, and in 2023, she edited the fifth issue of Manazir Journal, on The Idea of ​​the Just Ruler in Persianate Art and Material Culture. She also has written numerous articles on pictorial production, female patronage, and artistic society in 17th-century Isfahan. During the 2023-2024 academic year, Habibi was a visiting professor at the École du Louvre in Paris, where she taught courses on Iranian, Mughal, and Ottoman art from the 16th to the 19th centuries, and her current research focuses on Jean Pozzi’s Perso-Islamic collection, now dispersed throughout the world.

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

Stefan Kamola (Ph.D., University of Washington, 2013) has taught at Princeton University and Eastern Connecticut State University and is currently a research fellow at the Institute of Iranian Studies in Vienna. His first book, entitled Making Mongol History: Rashid al-Din and the Jami‘ al-Tawarikh (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), focuses on the historical works of Rashid al-Din and their reception across six centuries of manuscript transmission. His current work continues to explore the intellectual history of Mongol Iran, including the development of popular astrology.

See Stefan Kamola’s video:
Rashid al-Din and the Compendium of Chronicles

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, 2023).

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 Professor and Chair of Religious 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, the production and circulation of relics, and the biography of the Prophet Muhammad. He recently contributed the entry “Islamic Relics” to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion.

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

Yoram Meital is Professor of Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University. He specializes in modern Egypt’s social, cultural, and political history. For over thirty years, he has documented Cairo’s Jewish communal sites—including synagogues, cemeteries, and libraries—through fieldwork, photography, and archival research. From 2017 to 2021, he actively participated in Jewish heritage preservation as a historical consultant to the Cairo Jewish community. His 2024 book, Sacred Places Tell Tales, examines Cairo’s surviving synagogues and the evolving lives of their Jewish communities.

See Yoram Meital’s video:
Sacred Spaces, Shared Cultures: Cairo’s Synagogues and Egyptian Jewish Life and Heritage

Leslee Katrina Michelsen works at the US Department of State now as the Director of International Expositions and previously as the Director of the National Museum of American Diplomacy. She has served as the Senior Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design in Honolulu, as well as the Head of the Curatorial and Research Section at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar. Dr. Michelsen has worked on numerous cultural heritage and archaeology projects throughout Central Asia, South Asia, and East Africa stretching from Azerbaijan to Zanzibar. She is a specialist of materiality and making, as well as contemporary museology and cultural heritage. She co-founded the first MA program in Museum Studies in Uzbekistan at the Silk Road University in Samarkand, sits on the Board of Directors of ICOM-US (where she is also Co-Chair of the Programs Committee), and serves as a peer reviewer for the American Alliance of Museums.

See Leslee Michelsen’s videos:
Jali
Pishtaq

Heba Mostafa is Associate Professor of Islamic art and architecture in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto, St George Campus, as well as Senior Fellow at Massey College. She received her doctorate from Cambridge University’s Department of Architecture in 2012. Her research focuses on the formation of Islamic architecture as well as Islam’s interface with late antiquity, Christianity, and Judaism through commemorative architecture, pilgrimage, and ritual practice, with a particular focus on Jerusalem and Cairo.  Her current project explores nature veneration practices in medieval Cairo, with a focus on the Nilometer at al-Rawda Island, bringing into conversation the mediatory role of nature in reconciling the religious, spiritual, and scientific contexts in medieval Islam. She is the author of Architecture of Anxiety: Body Politics and the Formation of Islamic Architecture (Brill, 2024).

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

Lacy Murphy is the Scholar-in-Residence in Art History at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston. She specializes in the visual culture of modern France and colonial Algeria, with particular interest in photography and political propaganda. Her current research examines the ways that the visual cultures of World War II and the Cold War shaped international understandings of the Algerian War of Independence. Her work has appeared in the Journal of North African Studies.

See Lacy Murphy’s video:
Colonial Propaganda in Algeria during World War II (Coming soon)

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 Persianate spheres.

See Mika Natif’s videos:
Simurgh
Images of the Virgin Mary in Mughal Art
Mongol Cosmopolitanism: The Case of Rashid al-Din and his Moses

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. She is the co-editor of the volume Hagia Sophia in the Long Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) and the author of Architectural Revolution on the Ottoman Frontier: Greece and Albania in the Age of Ali Pasha (Penn State University Press, 2025).

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 an independent scholar and historian of art and architecture specializing in the Perso-Islamic world from Iran to India. Her publications explore the purveying of Iran’s cultural heritage, life histories of manuscripts and buildings, and cultural relations between Iran and the Deccan. The last culminated in her edited volume Iran and the Deccan: Persianate Art, Culture, and Talent in Circulation, 1400–1700 (2020). Overton is the Director and Curator of The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin: An Online Exhibition of an Iranian Shrine, an independent production of her academic studio 33 Arches and hosted by Khamseen. Her publications on the Emamzadeh Yahya include “Jane Dieulafoy in Varamin: The Emamzadeh Yahya through a Nineteenth-Century Lens” (2024), “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

Cynthia Packert (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1988) is the Christian A. Johnson Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Middlebury College. She teaches courses on all aspects of Asian and Islamic art, with a particular focus on India. She is the author of The Sculpture of Medieval Rajasthan (Brill, 1997) and The Art of Loving Krishna: Ornamentation and Devotion (Indiana University Press, 2010) as well as numerous articles on Indian art and iconography. Most recently she has been focusing on visual culture of 19^th-century Swaminarayan Hinduism in Gujarat.

See Cynthia Packert’s video:
Stone Inlay (Coming soon)

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, she worked at the Worcester Art Museum, Harvard Art Museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 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
Falnama

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
A Large Ottoman Embroidery with Pinecones in the Aga Khan Museum (Coming soon)

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’ videos:
Swahili Mosques Between Sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian Ocean
The Fortifications of Medieval Cairo

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

Hala Qasqas holds a Ph.D. in Islamic Art History from the University of Victoria. Her research examines the social, urban, and architectural history of Damascus, with particular attention to coffeehouses and shadow theatre in the early modern period. Her work has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Barakat Trust. She recently completed a Barakat Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Khalili Research Centre, University of Oxford, where she investigated the visual and material culture of Syrian shadow puppets. She now works as a Curatorial Assistant for the Islamic Arts Biennale 2027 in Jeddah, contributing to curatorial research, object selection, and exhibition development. Alongside her academic research and teaching, Hala works in animation, motion graphics, and video editing, exploring innovative approaches to studying and presenting cultural heritage. She is Khamseen’s Motion Graphics and Video Production Editor.

See Hala Qasqas’ video:
Shadow Theater (Khayal al-Zill) in Late Ottoman Damascus (Coming soon)

Elizabeth Rauh (PhD, University of Michigan, 2020) is Assistant Professor of Modern Art History and Visual Cultures as well as Director of the Visual Arts Program at The American University in Cairo (AUC). Specializing in the history of arts and visual cultures of Iraq, Iran, and Western Asia, she examines artist engagements with Islamic heritage, popular image practices and technologies in the Islamic world, and arts of the 1960s “Shi‘i Left.” She also pursues research in ecological art practices in the history of the Persian Gulf, such as in her article “Experiments in Eden: Midcentury Artist Voyages into the Mesopotamian Marshlands” (Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World, 2021). Her research has been funded by The Academic Research Institute in Iraq, the Darat al Funun Center for Modern and Contemporary Arab Art, the Max Weber Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

See Elizabeth Rauh’s videos:
A Hot Wind Blows: Ecocritical Art in the Middle East
Aisha Khalid’s Your Way Begins on the Other Side in the Aga Khan Museum (Coming soon)

Yael Rice is Associate Professor of art history and Asian languages and civilizations at Amherst College, Massachusetts. 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. She is author of the The Brush of Insight: Artists and Agency at the Mughal Court (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2023) and co-editor, with Dipti Khera, of Readings on Painting from 75 Years of Marg (Mumbai: Marg, 2023). Her current projects include a guest-edited issue of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture on “The Urgency of the Digital” as well as a collaborative project on a twelfth-century Qur’an manuscript from Iran that resides today in the collections of the Penn Museum in Philadelphia.

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

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 (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2020) is Assistant Professor in the History of Photography and New Media at Duke University. Her book manuscript-in-progress, tentatively titled Between Art and Propaganda: Photographing Revolution in Modern Iran (1905–1911), focuses on the art and visual culture of Iran’s Constitutional Revolution. Translation and cross-cultural contact also 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. Besides serving as the co-founder of the Virtual Islamic Art History Seminar Series, she is a Founding Member of Khamseen, where she served as Managing Director (2023-25) and is currently working on Research & Development.

See Mira Xenia Schwerda’s videos:
Minaret
The Bryce Miniature Qur’an and Its Travels Across the Globe

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

Eszter Spät is a lecturer at the Cultural Heritage Studies Program of the Central European University in Vienna. Her research focuses on the Yezidis of Iraq, concentrating on the scripturalization of Yezidi religious oral tradition and the transformation of various aspects of Yezidi religio-cultural heritage into a “bookish” religion. She is also interested in the identity formation of Yezidis within the framework of modern nationalist movements in the Middle East. She has published two books—Late Antique Motifs in Yezidi Oral Tradition (2010) and The Yezidis (2005)—and numerous articles. She also produced a documentary film on the Yezidis entitled Following the Peacock (2014).

See Eszter Spät’s video:
The Nîshans of the Yezidis of Northern Iraq

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

Courtney A. Stewart (PhD, Bard Graduate Center, 2024) is Research Associate at The Metropolitan Museum of Art specializing in Islamic art history and the history of jewelry and gemstones. She also is an Accredited Senior Gemologist with a Graduate Gemologist (G.G.) credential from the Gemological Institute of America (GIA). She has taught at New York University, the Bard Graduate Center, and the University of Toronto. Her research interests include the intersections of art and nature, the cultural significance of gemstones and jewelry, the trade and circulation of precious stones, and rituals surrounding jewelry acquisition and wear. She is currently working on a publication of The Met’s collection of North African jewelry, to be published in 2027.

See Courtney A. Stewart’s video:
Islamic Gems and Jewels in The Metropolitan Museum of Art 

Aseman Talebi is a Ph.D. student in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on Iranian visual culture from the nineteenth century to the present, encompassing Qajar-era material as well as modern and contemporary art of the Iranian diaspora. She examines artistic exchanges between Qajar Iran and Europe and how these encounters shaped evolving ideals of beauty, fashion, and performance, as well as the revival and reinterpretation of ancient Iranian motifs in contemporary artistic practice. She has held curatorial positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Aga Khan Museum, and the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva. She received her B.A. in History of Art and French and Francophone Studies, as well as her B.S. in Biopsychology, Cognition, and Neuroscience, from the University of Michigan in 2024. She currently serves as Khamseen’s Administrative Assistant and Pedagogy Coordinator.

See Aseman Talebi’s video:
A Badge of the Persian Order of the Lion-and-Sun in the Aga Khan Museum (Coming soon)

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 (Ph.D., University Ca’ Foscari of Venice) is Associate Professor at the University of Udine (Italy). 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. She is director of the Bazhera Archaeological Project, which aims to investigate a stopover station in Iraqi Kurdistan during the Ottoman period and of the ISLAMit Project_Mapping digital pathways of Islamic Heritage in Italy, focused on Islamic material culture preserved in museums and archaeological sites of North-Eastern Italy.

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

Elizabeth Dospěl Williams is Penny Vinik Chair for Fashion, Textiles, and Jewelry at the MFA Boston. She was formerly Curator of the Byzantine Collection at the Dumbarton Oaks. 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
Jewelry in Islamic Lands

Arielle Winnik (Ph.D., Bryn Mawr College, 2022) is the Donna Torrance Assistant Curator of Indo-Pacific Art at the Yale University Art Gallery. Her research focuses on textiles across and beyond the Islamic world, from Arabic-inscribed textiles used by Egypt’s Christian minority population to silks found in western China. Her current project at Yale focuses on the Art Gallery’s collection of over 1,000 textiles from the Indonesian Archipelago, which range from the thirteenth century to the present. Her recent publications include articles on tiraz textiles found in Northeast Africa (“Dress and Identity in Christian Nubia,” Convivium [2024]) and on textiles from Java’s Kerek region (“Textiles from the Rens Heringa Collection at the Yale University Art Gallery,” Textiles Asia [2024]).

See Arielle Winnik’s video:
Batik

Meredyth Lynn Winter (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2020) is Lecturer of Early Islamic Arts at The Courtauld Institute of Art. She is a specialist of medieval Islamic material culture and craft whose research focuses on the tenth to thirteenth centuries from Baghdad to Bukhara. Her research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Institute of Iranian Studies, and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. She is currently working on a collaborative publication of the archaeological material for medieval Rayy under the Seljuks and Buyids. Her first book on the interconnected arts of medieval Iran is also in preparation.

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 an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. A historian of medieval and early modern Islamic art, she specializes in the architecture and material culture of the Indian Ocean world, with a focus on Muslim communities in coastal China and their multifaceted engagement with the region’s other Muslim societies. Her primary research interests include mosque and shrine architecture, pilgrimage and the idea of sacred geography, and the intersections of narrative building with material and spatial presentation. She is currently developing her first book project, which examines the capacious idea of mosque construction—as imitation, recreation, and a form of history (re)writing—in the medieval Chinese port city of Quanzhou.

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

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)