Kirsten Scheid is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the American University of Beirut and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History. She researches Imagination; Islamic and Arabic Theories of Visuality; and Modern and Contemporary Art between cultural junctures, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. She co-curated “Historical Modernisms in the Middle East” for ArteEast’s Virtual Gallery (2008), “The Arab Nude: the Artist as Awakener” (Beirut, 2016) which will be hosted in expanded form [...]

Aziza Shanazarova is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Columbia University, where she specializes on the religious history of Islamic Central Asia and the broader Persianate world with an emphasis on the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. She holds a dual PhD in Religious Studies and Central Eurasian Studies completed at Indiana University-Bloomington in 2019. Before joining Columbia University, Aziza served as a UCIS/REEES Postdoctoral Associate in the Humanities at the University of Pittsburgh and taught at Stanford [...]

Eloïse Brac de la Perrière is Professor of Islamic Art at Sorbonne University. She has devoted several studies to manuscripts in Sultanate India, including L’art du livre dans l’Inde des sultanats (2008) and Le Coran de Gwalior. Polysémie d’un manuscript à peintures (2016). She has led a research program about the painted manuscripts of Kalīla wa Dimna at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and shared the curatorship of the exhibition "Paroles de bêtes (à l'usage des princes)" (Institut du monde [...]

Dr. Mandana Barkeshli by profession is a conservation scientist and her interest include material technology of Persian medieval manuscripts with special reference to papers, dyes, pigments, and sizings based on historical recipes, re-creating medieval recipes, and making a database to archive materials, their analysis, and their comparison on original samples. She is internationally recognised for her discoveries related to traditional preventive measures in Persian manuscripts such as saffron stigmas used as an inhibitor to counteract the destructive effect of [...]

Dr Francesca Leoni is Assistant Keeper and Curator of Islamic Art at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, associated faculty in the oriental studies and history of art departments at the University of Oxford and associate researcher at the Khalili Research Centre for the Art and Material Culture of the Middle East also in Oxford. Prior to the Ashmolean, she held research, teaching, and curatorial positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rice University and the [...]

She started her PhD in the History of Architecture program at Istanbul Technical University. She spent a year as a visiting special student at the Aga Khan Program, Harvard University, in the 2009-2010 academic year and audited several courses from the history of art and architecture department and also Center for Middle Eastern studies. In 2012, she completed her dissertation entitled “Selim III’s Istanbul: Building Activities In The Light Of Political and Military Transformations”. In 2014, she received a senior [...]

Alison Gascoigne is an archaeologist, based since 2007 at the University of Southampton, with research interests in the medieval Islamic world, particularly Egypt but also Afghanistan. She has directed, co-directed and collaborated with major fieldwork projects across Egypt, from the Mediterranean coast, via Cairo and the Kharga Oasis, to the first cataract region. She has recently published a monograph (The Island City of Tinnīs: A Postmortem, 2020) detailing the results of a long-term research project at the important late antique [...]

Dr Micaela Sinibaldi is an archaeologist specialising in the  archaeology and material culture of the Islamic  and Crusader periods in the Middle East.  After obtaining a PhD from Cardiff University with a thesis on the Crusader period in the Lordship of Transjordan, she has held post-doctoral positions at Humboldt-Universität and Freie Universität, Berlin and at the Council for British Research in the Levant and she has served as acting Deputy Director at the Kenyon Institute in Jerusalem (Council for British Research [...]

Dr Gizem Tongo is a historian specialising in the visual and material culture of the late Ottoman Empire. Her research and publications to date have sought to present the cosmopolitan and multicultural aspects of the Ottoman cultural past and a new reading of its intellectual milieu; one in which Levantine, foreign, women, non-Muslim as well as Muslim artists, intellectuals, and their work have the place they deserve. Dr Gizem Tongo holds a doctorate in Oriental Studies from University of Oxford, St John’s [...]

Jody Butterworth joined the Endangered Archives Programme team in 2012 as curator. The Programme facilitates the digitisation of archives around the world that are in danger of destruction, neglect or physical deterioration while making them available to as wide an audience as possible. EAP is supported by Arcadia and administered by the British Library. As part of her role, Jody co-authored Remote Capture: Digitising Cultural Heritage in Challenging Locations. She applied to the Barakat Trust to have the book translated [...]

Corinne Mühlemann studied art history and Islamic studies in Zurich and Bern, with a special qualification in the History of Textile Arts. She received a PhD from the University of Bern for her research on the use of medieval Islamic textiles in the Eastern Mediterranean and Central Asia (project fully supported by the Swiss National Research Foundation). She has been a member of the research group Global Horizons in pre-modern Art at the Institute of Art History, University of Bern. [...]

Iman R. Abdulfattah is a PhD Candidate in Islamic Art and Archaeology at Universität Bonn, writing her dissertation on the urban complex commissioned by the Mamluk Sultan al-Manṣūr Qalāwūn (r. 678-689/1279-1290) in Cairo. She also teaches courses on Islamic art and architecture at NYU's School of Professional Studies. Prior to this, she worked in the Islamic Art Department at The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and was a Project Manager at the Ministry of Antiquities in Egypt where she worked on [...]

Agnieszka Dobrowolska graduated as an architect from Warsaw University of Technology in 1983. Since 1993, she has been living in Egypt and working as an architectural conservation practitioner and architect specialising in historic preservation, design in historical context, and museum and exhibition design. She is a director of ARCHiNOS Architecture and a chair of its not-for-profit branch, the Sultan Foundation. Since 1996, she directed more than forty different architectural conservation, museum and exhibition design, and presentation projects in Egypt and the [...]

Margaret S. Graves is Associate Professor of Islamic art in the department of Art History at Indiana University. She received a PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2010 for her research on the plastic arts of the medieval Islamic world, and her research has been supported by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the British Academy and the AHRC, amongst others. Her 2018 monograph Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament and Architecture in Medieval Islam (Oxford University Press), supported by [...]

Sinem Erdoğan İşkorkutan earned her Ph.D. from Boğaziçi University Department of History in September 2017. Her research focuses on the early modern Ottoman visual culture and Ottoman cultural history. Her PhD thesis presented the first comprehensive monograph on an Ottoman imperial festival and it was awarded with the Boğaziçi University Scientific Research Fund Doctoral Dissertation Award. She received grants and scholarships from several institutions including TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey), ARIT (American-Turkish Research Institute in Turkey), [...]

Kristine Rose-Beers ACR is Head of Conservation at the Chester Beatty in Dublin, Ireland, and an accredited member of the Institute of Conservation (ICON). She graduated from the Conservation programme at Camberwell College of Arts in 2002. Kristine’s research interests include the conservation of Islamic manuscript material, early binding structures, and the use of pigments and dyes in medieval manuscripts. Recent publications include: 'Indo-Persian Histories from the Object Out: The St Andrews Qur'an Manuscript between Timurid, Safavid, Mughal, and Deccani [...]

Nilay Özlü is an architectural historian with a focus on the urban culture of Istanbul, late-Ottoman history, museum studies, and court culture. She submitted her doctoral dissertation From Imperial Palace to Museum: The Topkapi Palace during the Long Nineteenth Century at Boğaziçi University, Department of History. She worked as the project coordinator and historical consultant for the Topkapı Palace Museum restoration projects between 2014-2016. Her co-edited volume The City in the Muslim World was published by Routledge in 2015 (second [...]

Amanda Phillips (DPhil, Oxon, 2011) is an assistant professor of Islamic Art and Material Culture at the McIntire Department of Art at the University of Virginia, in the United States. She has been a fellow of the Kunsthistorisches Institute at the Berlin Museum of Islamic Art, a Marie Curie Fellow of the Gerda Henkel Stiftung at the University of Birmingham, and a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the University of St Andrews. Her first book, Everyday Luxuries (Dortmund, 2016) discussed [...]

Dr Silke Ackermann studied History, Languages & Cultures of the Orient, and History of Science at Frankfurt University. She worked for 16 years in curatorial and managerial roles at the British Museum in London before taking up a professorship at a private university in Germany. In 2014, she returned to the UK to join the History of Science Museum at the University of Oxford. Dr Ackermann’s main research interests include the transfer of knowledge between the Islamic World and Europe, [...]

Noorah Al-Gailani has been Curator of Islamic Civilisations at Glasgow Museums since 2003. She is based at the Burrell Collection but works across the city’s many museums to interpret Islamic art and culture, both ancient and modern, through research, exhibitions and a variety of educational activities and public events. Noorah graduated with a BA in Interior Design from the College of Fine Arts, Baghdad University and gained three years experience in design and folk art preservation before coming to live [...]

Omniya Abdel Barr is an architect with experience in urban conservation, monument restoration and cultural heritage documentation and digitisation. Her work is focused on Mamluk art and architecture in Egypt. She holds a PhD in history from Aix-Marseille University (2015), an MSc in Conservation from Raymond Lemaire Center in KUL (2004) and a BSc in Architecture from the Fine Arts of Helwan University (2000). She is currently the Barakat Trust Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, working [...]

Cailah Jackson‘s research focuses on the medieval arts of the book of the central and eastern Islamic lands. Cailah gained her DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2017 and is the recipient of several awards including the 2018 Leigh Douglas Memorial Dissertation Prize, given by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Islamic Manuscripts of Late Medieval Rūm, 1270s–1370s: Production, Patronage and the Arts of the Book (Edinburgh University Press) and [...]

Doa Sarmad Khan received the Barakat International Studentship in 2019 to study the MA in Conservation Studies at the University of York. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan. She is interested in studying the interaction of cultures on the Indus Plains, and in preserving the exchange between Islam, Persia, Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. She is further interested in developing strategies for the democratization of cultural heritage conservation policy and [...]

Alison McQuitty is an archaeologist with a particular interest in vernacular architecture, rural settlement and landscape in Jordan during the 6th – 20th centuries A.D. She has a B.A. in European Archaeology from the University of Durham and an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from SOAS, University of London. Alison lived and worked in Jordan and Syria for some 25 years, ultimately becoming Director of the Council for British Research in the Levant. She co-directed the excavations at Khirbat Faris, [...]

Kristýna is a DPhil candidate in Oriental Studies at the Khalili Research Centre for the Art and Material Culture of the Middle East, of the University of Oxford. With the support of the Barakat Grant, she attended the Ottoman Summer School at the Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilization during summer 2019. Her doctoral research project addresses the pictorial representation of architecture in 15th- and 16th-century Ottoman illustrated manuscripts. In 2017, she presented some preliminary conclusions of her research [...]

Yeliz Teber is a D.Phil. student in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford since 2016. Her research interests include the Bektashi order of dervishes, Sufi shrines, Kızılbash/Alevi communities, dervish paraphernalia, hagiographies, and ritual manuals (Erkanname, Fütüvvetname, and ‘Buyruk’) in the late-medieval and early-modern Ottoman Empire. With the generous support of the Barakat Trust, she completed her master’s degree with a distinction in Islamic art and architecture at the University of Oxford in 2016. Her master’s dissertation examined the legends [...]

Ayşin Yoltar-Yıldırım is currently at the Brooklyn Museum from the Harvard Art Museums, where she was the Assistant Curator of Islamic and Later Indian Art since 2013. At Harvard she worked toward the reinstallation of the new Islamic and Later Indian Art galleries, which opened in 2014, and curated the recent exhibition A New Light on Bernard Berenson: Persian Paintings from Villa I Tatti. She is also the editor of an upcoming book on the same subject, which will be [...]

Emily Shovelton is a specialist in art from the Islamic world. She completed her PhD at SOAS on fifteenth-century Persian manuscripts from the Indian Sultanates. Since working on various projects at the British Museum she has tutored and lectured for courses at SOAS, Sotheby’s Institute of Art and the V&A Museum. She is currently a Research Associate at the Khalili Research Centre in Oxford and is organising a workshop on art and architecture of the South Asia Sultanates.

Jaimee Comstock-Skipp holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley in Near Eastern studies with a speciality in Arabic and Islamic civilizations (2009). She also holds an MA from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art (2012) and a second MA from The Courtauld Institute of Art in London (2015), where she studied book arts of the Mongol through Safavid periods. She received linguistic training in Farsi and Tajiki in Tajikistan where she also conducted research [...]

Fatma Dahmani is a Barakat Trust postdoctoral fellow. Her original project focused solely on the Abbasid painting of the Caliphal palace of Samarra in Iraq and the extent to which it is an original piece. After having conducted further research into the broader city more things caught her eye. This included the paintings discovered in other parts of the city such as in mosques, bath houses and homes. Fatma is working on a monograph on all of the paintings of [...]

Dr Olga Bush is a scholar of Islamic art and architecture, whose research interests engage interdisciplinary methods and theoretical issues in a wide variety of topics ranging from the relationship of poetry to architecture in medieval Muslim aesthetics to nineteenth-century European and American Orientalism, to patronage of the arts in twentieth-century collecting practices. Currently, a Visiting Associate Professor of Islamic art and architecture at Bard College, she has taught at SUNY-New Paltz and Vassar College, held fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum [...]