Vision

Islamic art history accounts for fourteen centuries of art, architecture, and visual and material culture produced across the world. Its scope is vast and varied, and extends well beyond Arab lands and the Middle East to incorporate Islamic creative practices stretching from America to China. Khamseen aims to capture this richness and complexity by providing educators, students, and the public at large with a broad range of digital resources about the Islamic world. Our goal is to not only pry open the field but also engage students and interested audiences in a more global, diverse, inclusive, and interdisciplinary view of Islam, art, and history.

Since launching in August 2020, we have sought to expand the accessibility of Khamseen‘s Topic talks through the inclusion of closed captioning and foreign-language translation as well as developing new projects. For the former, we are currently translating short-form presentations’ titles and abstracts into six languages, and currently we are piloting closed captioning in Arabic. We launched a Glossary of Terms in August 2021; the Glossary consists of short-form video talks by leading scholars who provide concise, engaging, and expansive definitions of key terms for the study of Islamic art, architecture, and visual culture. We now are expanding our roster of contents to include Concepts, Themes, Translations, large-scale Projects, and cross-institutional collaborations to create a deep and rich repository of resources dedicated to global Islamic arts and cultures.

Through this platform, which conjoins Islamic Art History and the Digital Humanities, we seek to take the study of Islamic art out to the world in a completely free, open, and accessible manner. We hope to reach an international level of engagement and learning thanks to the possibilities of integrated digital technologies, and, above all, to build bridges across cultures through the arts.