Khamseen‘s Graduate Student Presentation Award (GSPA) is an annual prize that enables advanced PhD students to feature their expertise and contribute a talk to Khamseen. Find out more about GSPA awardees and access their talks below. Calls for applications to the GSPA are announced in January and can be found in our News section.
When Languages Meet on the Page: Coptic, Arabic, and Ritual Structure in a Church Consecration Manuscript
(Coming in 2027)
2026 Khamseen GSPA Recipient
Danielle Andrea Krikorian (PhD, History of Art, University of Birmingham, July 2026) is an art historian and artist specialising in modern and contemporary art from Lebanon and the wider Arab world. Her doctoral dissertation, “Patterns of Abstraction: Lebanese Women Artists and Decolonial Aesthetics in Times of War,” examined the relationship between abstraction, war, and decolonial aesthetics. Her wider research explores the manuscript and devotional cultures of the Mashriq across Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions, including work with the Cadbury Research Library’s Christian and Jewish holdings. Her publications include “Affective Rematriation in the Art of Mounira Al Solh,” in Tate Papers (2026), alongside articles in MeMiRe and Dār Journal. In September 2026, she joined Newcastle University as Lecturer in Art History.
Calligraphic Style in Manuscripts of the Kitab-i Nawras (Book of Nine Flavors)
2025 Khamseen GSPA Recipient
Zoë Woodbury High received her PhD from the University of Chicago in August 2025 and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Osaka, funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. She is a cultural historian of early modern South Asia and the Indian Ocean World, with a focus on the multilingual literatures, music, and arts of South India’s Deccan courts. Her dissertation, titled “Renewing the Nine Rasas: Translating Taste in the Early Modern Deccan Sultanates,” examined the poetics, manuscript tradition, and reception of the seventeenth-century vernacular song collection Kitab-i Nauras (Book of Nine Tastes) by Ibrahim Adil Shah II. Her broader interests include connections between aesthetics and consumption culture; Islam, music, and the arts; and religious interactions in early modern South Asia.
Fragmentation
(Coming in 2026)
2025 Khamseen GSPA Recipient
Hossein Nakhaei is a PhD candidate in History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh and currently a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellow. Trained as an architect, he approaches displaced material culture in museums through the dynamics of space and design. His dissertation, entitled “Luminous Past, Fragmented Present: Persian Luster Tiles from Sacred Architecture to Museum Galleries,” critically examines assumptions about luster tiles in Western scholarship and proposes new ways of understanding them in relation to their ecological, devotional, and architectural contexts. He is the author of The Great Mosque of Varamin: The Process of Formation and Evolution (in Persian, 2019), which received the 12th Farabi International Award in 2021.
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. She is currently the International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Cogut Institute and the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. She 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 manuscripts and material culture. Her fields of interest include Indian vernacular and Persian literature, early modern manuscript culture, book 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 received her Ph.D. from the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. She is currently 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.