Meet our many Khamseen contributors! They include professors, curators, librarians, lecturers, postdoctoral fellows, and advanced PhD students who specialize in Islamic studies, art history, and allied fields in the arts and humanities. Like Team Khamseen, they share a deep commitment to the academic study and public promotion of Islamic art as well as the creation of completely free and open scholarly resources about Islam’s expressive cultures across the globe. Khamseen embodies their voices, expertise, and generosity.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
#A
Esra Akın-Kıvanç is Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of South Florida’s School of Art and Art History. Her current research focuses on cross-cultural exchanges between Byzantium and Islam as manifested in bilingual inscriptions in Greek and Arabic featured on liturgical objects and architectural surfaces. Akın-Kıvanç has co-authored, with Howard Crane, Sinan’s Autobiographies: Five Sixteenth-Century Texts (Brill: Leiden, 2006), and she is author of Mustafa Âli’s Epic Deeds of Artists: A Critical Edition of the Earliest Ottoman Text about the Calligraphers and Painters of the Islamic World (Brill: Leiden, 2011) and Muthanna / Mirror Writing in Islamic Art: History, Theory, and Aesthetics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020).
See Esra Akın-Kıvanç’s video:
Muthanna
Angela Andersen researches and teaches the architectures of minority Muslim communities, and inter- and intra-religious interactions through architecture. She runs an educational program for children about architecture around the world, and has worked with museums, not-for-profit organizations, and initiatives involving architecture and social issues. She was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship with AKPIA@MIT focused on her work with Alevi communities in Turkey, and has published on Alevi architecture in a number of books and journals. She is the guest editor of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture 11/2 (2022) on the theme of hinterland forces and marginalization in Islamic architecture.
See Angela Andersen’s video:
Cemevi
Glaire Anderson is Senior Lecturer in Islamic Art at the University of Edinburgh. Her scholarly work explores the art of al-Andalus and the early Islamic West. She is currently finishing a second monograph that explores medieval Islamic science and visual culture through the career of the ninth-century Cordoban polymath ‘Abbas Ibn Firnas, who is famous for an experiment in early human flight. She is also pursuing research on digital art history and heritage, and the Islamic visual culture of the Philippines.
See Glaire Anderson’s videos:
Mihrab at the Great Mosque of Córdoba
Munya
Michelle Apotsos is an Associate Professor of Art History at Williams College, specializing in Afro-Islamic architecture and creative production. She received her PhD from Stanford University in 2013 and has taught courses on sustainable architecture, Islamic art in Africa, “World” Architecture, and African art in Western museum spaces. She has also published in various journals, including African Arts, the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, Ghana Journal, and Material Culture Review. She is the author of Architecture, Islam, and Identity in West Africa: Lessons from Larabanga (Routledge, 2016) and The Masjid in Contemporary Islamic Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and her current projects focus on environmentalism in the built landscape, alternative masjid / mosque spaces in contemporary Africa, and the rise of Ottoman-style mosques in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa.
See Michelle Apotsos’s video:
Toron
Hala Auji is an Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut, where she teaches courses on the art, architecture, and material culture of the Islamic world. Her work focuses on the visual dimensions of modernity in the eastern Mediterranean, including print culture, book history, museum practices, and portraiture. She is the author of Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Brill, 2016). In addition, she has published articles in Platform, Review of Middle East Studies, Visible Language, and The Journal of Middle East Culture and Communication.
See Hala Auji’s videos:
Manufactured Images: The Engravings of 19th-Century Arabic Periodicals
Qibla
#B
Carol Bier is a historian of Islamic art, who has published widely on cultural aspects of geometry in Islamic art that inform beauty of form, pattern and structure. A Research Scholar with the Center for Islamic Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA, since 2010, she is concurrently Research Associate at The Textile Museum in Washington, DC (2001–present), where she served as Curator for Eastern Hemisphere Collections (1984–2001). She was President of the Textile Society of America (2006–08).
See Carol Bier’s videos:
Ikat (Coming Soon)
Suzani (Coming Soon)
Patricia Blessing is Associate Professor of Art and Art History at Stanford University. Blessing is the author of Rebuilding Anatolia after the Mongol Conquest: Islamic Architecture in the Lands of Rūm, 1240–1330 (Ashgate, 2014) and Architecture and Material Politics in the Fifteenth-century Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2022). With Elizabeth Dospel Williams and Eiren Shea, she co-authored Medieval Textiles across Eurasia, c. 300-1400 for the Cambridge Elements series Global Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Blessing’s work has been supported by the ANAMED Research Center for Anatolian Cultures, the Barakat Trust, the British Academy, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the International Center of Medieval Art, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and the Society of Architectural Historians.
See Patricia Blessing’s videos:
Water and Sound in Islamic Architecture
Squinch and Pendentive
Alexander Brey is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at Wellesley College. He received his PhD and MA in the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College. His research interests include the visual cultures in the Umayyad caliphate and the medieval Mediterranean more generally, ranging from studies of the built environment to the trade and reuse of luxury goods. He is currently working on his book project, provisionally titled “The Caliph’s Prey: Hunting in the Visual Cultures of the Umayyad Empire,” and participating in the Getty Advanced Workshop on Network Analysis and Digital Art History. His work has been supported by fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and the American Center for Oriental Research in Amman, Jordan.
See Alexander Brey’s video:
The Baths of al-Walid at Qusayr Amra
Sam Bowker is the Associate Professor in Art History and Visual Culture at Charles Sturt University. He and Seif El Rashidi published The Tentmakers of Cairo: Egypt’s Medieval and Modern Applique Craft in 2018 for the American University in Cairo Press. His ongoing research considers issues raised by Islamic art and design when seen from regional Australian perspectives, and he teaches Islamic art and design with a post-19th century focus.
See Sam Bowker’s video:
The Egyptian Tentmakers and the Art of Khayamiya
#C
Filiz Çakır Phillip holds a Dr. Phil. from the Institute of Art History at Freie Universität Berlin and is an independent curator and scholar of Islamic Art History. She worked as curator at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto (2013-2022) and at the Museum for Islamic Art in Berlin (2006-2012). She has curated numerous exhibitions, most recently: Lustre and Luxe from Islamic Spain: Liquid Frontiers and Entangled Worlds (2023) and Hidden Stories: Books Along the Silk Roads (2021–2023) with Prof. Suzanne Conklin Akbari. She has authored several books, including Syrian Living: Medieval to Modern (2022) with Dr. Anke Scharrahs. Çakır Phillip also serves as a member of the Professional Development Committee of the Renaissance Society of America and as a board member of the Association of Art Museum Curators & AAMC Foundation in New York.
See Filiz Çakır Phillip’s videos:
Mighfar
Tamgha
The History of the Blazon in the Mamluk Period
Sascha Crasnow (she/her) is the pedagogy coordinator for Khamseen and 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
#D
Eleanor Lucy Deacon is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). She is a specialist of Persian devotional drama. Her work with handwritten historical scripts pertaining to the Iranian Shiʿi passion play (taʿziyeh-khānī) led her into manuscript research, and an interest in the routes through which Persian and Arabic manuscripts entered the collections held in European libraries. Before moving to Fribourg to join the comparative project “Women, Martyrdom, & Religious Drama in the Abrahamic Traditions,” she was World Cultures Curator (Arabic and Persian) at the University of Edinburgh’s Heritage Collections, where she was instrumental in renaming the old “Oriental Manuscript Collection” as “Manuscripts of the Islamicate World and South Asia” (MIWSA) and creating the MIWSA collection’s online catalogue.
See Elanor Lucy Deacon’s video:
Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh: Provenance
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
#E
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
Aslıhan Erkmen (Ph.D., Istanbul Technical University) is Associate Professor of Art History at Istanbul Technical University, where she also serves as Art History Program Coordinator. Her main research interests include Islamic book arts, illustrated manuscripts, traditional arts and crafts, and intangible cultural heritage. With Şebnem Tamcan Parladır, she recently co-edited Zeren Tanındı Festschrift: Art and Culture of Books in the Islamic World (2022). Her scholarly output includes publications in both English and Turkish languages, as well as participation in EU-funded projects. Moreover, as a board member of Turkey’s Traditional Arts Association (TAA), she also practices the traditional arts of marbled paper and paper filigree.
See Aslıhan Erkmen’s video:
Hilye
#F
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
#G
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
Melanie Gibson is Editor of the Art Series at GINGKO. Her research focuses on ceramics of the Islamic world. Her 2010 PhD dissertation, “Takūk and Timthāl: A Study of Glazed Ceramic Sculpture from Iran and Syria c. 1150-1250,” explored ceramic figural sculpture. She has written articles and book chapters on sculpture in plaster and metalwork, including “‘Healing for What is in the Breasts’: Ceramic Breastfeeding Figures from the Medieval Islamic World,” in Fruit of Knowledge, Wheel of Learning: Studies in Honour of Professor Robert Hillenbrand (London: GINGKO, 2022).
See Melanie Gibson’s video:
Ceramic Breastfeeding Figures from Iran and Syria
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
Christiane Gruber is Professor of Islamic Art in the History of Art Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and Founding Director of Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online. Her fields of interest include Islamic ascension texts and images, depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, books arts, codicology, and paleography, architecture, and visual and material culture from the medieval period to today. Her most recent publications include her third monograph The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images and her edited volume The Image Debate: Figural Representation in Islam and Across the World, both published in 2019.
See Christiane Gruber’s videos:
A Safavid Painting of the Prophet Muhammad’s Miʿraj
“Do-For-Self”: The Visual Culture of the Nation of Islam
George Floyd in Iran, Syria, and Afghanistan: Visual Commentaries in Islamic Lands
Two Islamic Amulets in the Aga Khan Museum
Masjid
Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh: Images of the Prophet
Vivek Gupta researches connected book histories across South, Central, and West Asia (ca. 1200-present). Currently, he is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University College London. From 2020 to 2023, he served as a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Cambridge, where he continues to co-direct (with Suzanne Reynolds) a research and exhibition project at the Fitzwilliam Museum on Hindustani Airs: Music, Pleasure, and Cultural Exchange in Courtly Lucknow.Since 2020, he also has collaborated with several organizations in India to produce the webinar, From Konkan to Coromandel: Cultures and Societies of the Deccan World. His first book, Worldshaping Wonders: Books and Visual Knowledge in Hindustan, is under contract with Oxford University Press in the British Academy Monographs Series.
See Vivek Gupta’s video:
ʿAjab
#H
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
#K
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
Namrata B. Kanchan received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in Fall 2023. Her dissertation examines the genesis of early modern Dakani literature in western India’s Deccan sultanate courts through the study of the region’s manuscript and material culture. Her fields of interest include Indian vernacular and Persian literature, early modern manuscript culture, books arts, codicology, paleography, and visual and material culture from the fifteenth century to the present. In 2023, she won the Historians of Islamic Art Association’s (HIAA) Margaret B. Ševčenko Prize for her paper on calligraphic choices in early modern Dakani manuscripts.
See Namrata B. Kanchan’s (Graduate Student Presentation Award 2023 Recipient) video:
A Legacy of Female Power: Representations of Queen Humayun Shah from the Deccan’s Ahmadnagar Sultanate
Marion Katz is a Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Her research focuses on pre-modern Islamic law, gender, and ritual between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, especially the conceptual structures of legal works and how Islamic legal thought relates to other normative discourses that were authoritative for premodern Muslims. Her books includes Body of Text: The Emergence of the Sunni Law of Ritual Purity (2002), The Birth of The Prophet Muhammad: Devotional Piety in Sunni Islam (2007), Women in the Mosque: A History of Legal Thought and Social Practice (2014), and Wives and Work: Islamic Law and Ethics Before Modernity (2022).
See Marion Katz’s video:
Mawlid
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
#L
Ilkka Lindstedt (Ph.D., University of Helsinki, 2014) is Lecturer in Islamic theology at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has published scholarly articles on pre-Islamic Arabia, early Islam, Arabic epigraphy, and Arabic historiography. He is particularly interested in changes in religious groups and ideas in late antique Arabia. His monograph Muhammad and His Followers in Context: The Religious Map of Late Antique Arabia was published by Brill in 2024.
See Ilkka Lindstedt’s video:
Graffiti
#M
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.
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 the Director of the National Museum of American Diplomacy at the US Department of State. 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.
Nancy Micklewright writes primarily about the history of photography and fashion history in the Ottoman Empire with a focus on gender. Her edited volume, Mohamed Zakariya, a 21st century Master Calligrapher, was published in 2022 by Fons Vitae. Most recently she has received research fellowships from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art. Through 2019, she was Head of Public and Scholarly Engagement at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, where among other duties she served as the editor-in-chief of the journal Ars Orientalis. She has published widely on aspects of photographic practice in the Ottoman Empire, travel albums, local engagement with photography, and related issues. Her new book, Fashion in a Global City: Dress and Photography in late Ottoman Istanbul, will appear in 2025.
See Nancy Micklewright’s video:
Mohamed Zakariya and the Practice of Calligraphy
Ashley Miller is Assistant Curator of African Art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA). She specializes in the material and visual cultures of 19th– and 20th-century northwest Africa, with a broader interest in issues of heritage and collective memory, the history of museums in Africa, Muslim expressive cultures of Africa, and the politics and representation of identity in colonial and postcolonial societies. Currently, she is at work on a major exhibition entitled Ghana 1957, which explores Ghana’s position as a locus for transregional, pan-African artistic exchange in the decades following African independence from colonial rule.
See Ashley Miller’s video:
Djingareyber Mosque of Timbuktu: Expression and Innovation at the Saharan Crossroads
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 18th to the early 20th 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
Stephennie Mulder is Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a specialist in Islamic art, architectural history, and archaeology. Her book The Shrines of the ‘Alids in Medieval Syria: Sunnis, Shi’s and the Architecture of Coexistence (Edinburgh University Press, 2014) received UT Austin’s Hamilton Award Grand Prize, the World Prize for Book of the Year from the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Syrian Studies Association book prize, and was listed as an ALA Choice magazine outstanding academic title. Other publications include an edited volume, Imagining Antiquity in Islamic Societies (Intellect, 2022), as well as academic articles on medieval and contemporary art and architectural history, Islamic archaeology, and cultural heritage, including in the Journal of Islamic Archaeology, the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, and The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Archaeology.
See Stephennie Mulder’s video:
Muqarnas (coming soon)
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
#N
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
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.
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Ottoman Costume Portraits: Photographs in the Elbise-i Osmaniyye
#O
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).
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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
#P
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.
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.
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Al-Aqmar Mosque
#R
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.
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Ivories from Islamic Spain
Lustreware (Coming Soon)
D. Fairchild Ruggles is Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, with appointments in Art History, Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Medieval Studies, Spanish & Portuguese Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, the Center for Global Studies, and the Center for South Asian and Middle East Studies. She holds the Debra Mitchell Chair in Landscape Architecture and the Presidential Chair in Social Science and the Humanities, and she directs the university’s program in Criticism and Interpretive Theory. She is the art and architecture field editor for the Encyclopedia of Islam and has authored and edited numerous award-winning books on Islamic landscape and architectural history, heritage, and the arts patronage of women in the Islamic world and South Asia. Her most recent book, Tree of Pearls (Oxford University Press 2020), won ASOR’s Nancy Lapp Popular Book Award.
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Tree of Pearls: Shajar al-Durr and her Architectural Patronage
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
#S
Walid Saleh is Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto. He is a specialist of the Qur’an, the history of its interpretation, and the gloss tradition in medieval Islam. He is the author of two books, including The Formation of the Classical Tafsir Tradition (Brill, 2004). He is the recipient of a Konrad Adenauer Fellowship from the Humboldt Foundation and a New Directions Mellon Foundation Fellowship, and he also has served as Al-Qasimi Visiting Professor of Islamic Studies at Exeter University. He is currently working on a history of the Qur’an commentary tradition.
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Qur’an
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. She is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Art History at Carleton College. 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 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, global modern art history, Islamic art history, and South Asian 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
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
Eiren Shea (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2016) is Associate Professor of Art History at Grinnell College, where she offers classes on the arts of pre-modern Asia. She is the author of Mongol Court Dress, Identity Formation, and Global Exchange (Routledge, 2020). With Patricia Blessing and Elizabeth Dospěl Williams, she also co-authored Medieval Textiles across Eurasia, c. 300-1400 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Her work has been supported by the Chiang Ching Kuo Foundation, Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, The Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies, and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts (CASVA).
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Mongol Women’s Court Dress
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).
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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
#T
Yasser Tabbaa (Ph.D., Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, 1982) has written primarily on the architecture, calligraphy, and ornament of the medieval Islamic world, with occasional forays into contemporary religious architecture. In addition to his numerous articles, Tabbaa has published four books: Constructions of Power and Piety in Medieval Aleppo (Penn State Press, 1996); The Transformation of Islamic Art During the Sunni Revival (University of Washington Press, 2001); Najaf: The Gate of Wisdom (UNESCO, 2016); and The Production of Meaning in Islamic Architecture and Ornament (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). He has taught Islamic art and architecture at several US and Middle Eastern universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, Oberlin College, and NYU-Abu Dhabi.
See Yasser Tabba’s video:
Madrasat al-Firdaws in Aleppo
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.
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Monsoon Winds and Ming Porcelains: Collecting and Displaying Chinese Ceramics at the Mughal Court
Alison Terndrup (Ph.D., Boston University) is a Temporary Assistant Professor in the Art History Department at the University of Delaware. Her research spans the fields of Islamic and nineteenth-century art histories, focusing on Ottoman imperial and sub-imperial identities, cross-cultural encounters, and the uses of visual art in supporting ideologies of power. Terndrup was an Institute of Turkish Studies-Koç Holding Research Fellow and the recipient of multiple travel grants to Turkey, Serbia, and Romania. Her forthcoming article, “Mapping the ‘Miracle-Showing’ Portrait in Istanbul” will be published in Muqarnas in 2024.
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Picture in Picture: Images of the Sultan in Balkan Princely Portraits
#U
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.
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Külliye
Selin Ünlüönen (Ph.D., Yale University, 2021) is a Lecturer in the Princeton University Writing Program. She is currently writing a book about how manuscript paintings shaped the court culture of sixteenth-century Iran. Other scholarly interests include Ottoman alphabet books and the representation of epigraphy in Islamic paintings, a theme explored in her article “Between the Artist and the Patron: Painted Inscriptions of the Khamsa of Shah Tahmasb,” included in Inscriptions of the Medieval Islamic World (2023).
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Qalam
#V
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)
#W
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
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).
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
#Y
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)
#Z
Roxana Zenhari is a lecturer and research fellow at the Georg-August University, Göttingen. She is a historian of Islamic art whose work explores the relationship of texts and images with dominant cultural and political discourses in the premodern Persianate world. She wrote her PhD thesis on a fourteenth-century manuscript of Samak-e ʿayyār, now published under the title The Persian Medieval Romance Samak-e ʿayyār: Analysis of an Illustrated Inju Manuscript. Her most recent publication, Mirzā ʿAli-Qoli Khoʾi: The Master Illustrator of Persian Lithographed Books in the Qajar Period, written with Ulrich Marzolph, provides a study of illustrated lithographed books containing popular and religious stories printed in Iran during the first half of the nineteenth century.
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Shahnameh
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