Khamseen offers talks to support teaching, learning, and research in Islamic art, architecture, visual culture, and related fields. Since the website’s launch in Fall 2020, contributions by scholars in the field have consistently grown our catalogue. Khamseen‘s Graduate Student Presentation Award (GSPA) enables advanced PhD students to feature their expertise and contribute a talk to Khamseen. Find out more about GSPA awardees and access their talks here:
The British Appropriation of Mughal ‘Pacchikari’ (Stone Inlay), ca. 1840-1940
2024 Khamseen GSPA Recipient
Lola Cindrić completed two Master’s degrees in Heritage Conservation and Social Anthropology, after which she trained in the craft of stone inlay (also known as pietra dura) in Florence, Italy. She is now a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris and is affiliated with the Center for South Asian & Himalayan Studies (CESAH), also in Paris. Her dissertation focuses on past and present stone-inlaying connections between Italy and India, especially Florence and Agra, in order to explore the circulations of artifacts, their imbrications in power dynamics, and the construction of local and global hierarchies through artisanal knowledge and objects.
A Legacy of Female Power: Representations of Queen Humayun Shah from the Deccan’s Ahmadnagar Sultanate
2023 Khamseen GSPA Recipient
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.
The Ashab Mosque in Quanzhou: A Coastal Mosque in South China
2022 Khamseen GSPA Recipient
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.