Academic Advisory Committee
Alain Fouad George
Alain Fouad George is IM Pei Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture and a Fellow of Wolfson College at the University of Oxford. He taught previously at the University of Edinburgh (2007-17) and the Université Saint Joseph in Beirut (2005-7). His research focuses on early Qur'ans, Islamic calligraphy, and early Islamic architecture, which is the subject of his most recent monograph, The Umayyad Mosque of Damascus: Art, Faith, and Empire in Early Islam (Gingko Library, 2021). [...]
Alison Ohta
Alison Ohta is the director of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. She completed her doctoral thesis at SOAS, University of London, on bindings of the Mamluk period (1250–1516). She has lectured and published widely on the subject.
Dr Annabel Teh Gallop FBA
Head of the Southeast Asia section at the British Library in London, she works on Malay manuscripts, letters, documents and seals, and the art of the Islamic book in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean world. Recent publications include Malay seals from the Islamic world of Southeast Asia: Content, Form, Context, Catalogue (Singapore, 2019).
Dr Mariam Rosser-Owen
Curator Middle East, Asian Department, Victoria & Albert Museum, UK curator responsible for te Arab World Collections at the V&A I specialise in the Islamic Mediterranean, especially al-Andalus and the Maghrib, but more generally I am interested in material culture connections around the Mediterranean during the medieval period. I am interested in how people commission works of art and what messages they express through these commissions. Completed my DPhil at the University of Oxford (Oriental Institute) in 2002, supervised [...]
Dr Paul Wordsworth
Dr Paul Wordsworth is a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford specialising in the archaeology of the medieval Caucasus and Central Asia, with a particular interest on the northeastern fringes of the early Islamic world. He is currently directing two archaeological projects: one explores the landscape of a provincial Abbasid capital city in Azerbaijan, the other is with the Metropolitan Museum, New York, examining the emergence of a medieval Silk Road town in the desert of Turkmenistan. Having gained [...]
Dr Zeynep Yürekli-Görkay
University Lecturer in Islamic Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford, UK Interested in Islamic architecture; illustrated manuscripts; Sufi shrines; hagiography and historiography. 'Sufi Shrines under the Ottomans', in The Cambridge World History of Religious Architecture, ed. R. Etlin et al (Cambridge University Press).'Architectural Patronage and the Rise of the Ottomans', in The Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, ed. G. Necipolu and B. Flood, Volume II: From the Mongols to Modernism (Wiley–Blackwell).
Professor Jeremy Johns
Chairman of the Academic Advisory Committee; Director, Khalili Research Centre; Lecturer in Islamic Archaeology, University of Oxford, UK Interested in relations between Muslim and Christian societies in the medieval Mediterranean as manifested in material and visual culture. My research has focused upon the archaeology of the transition from late antiquity to early Islam in the Levant and, especially, upon the archaeology, history and art history of Sicily under Islamic and Norman rule, from the Muslims' conquest of the island in the [...]
Stephen Battle
Stephen Battle is an architect with 30 years professional experience managing conservation projects in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. He started on his professional path in Zanzibar, where he worked on projects in the historic Stone Town. From 1998 to 2008, he worked for the Aga Khan Trust for Culture based in Geneva, where he was project manager for conservation and urban rehabilitation projects in Syria, Tanzania and Pakistan. He joined World Monuments Fund in 2009 as Program Director, [...]
Past Academic Advisory Committee Members
Dr Teresa Fitzherbert
Faculty Tutor in Islamic Art, Khalili Research Centre, Oxford, UK Is interested in Persian illustrated manuscripts particularly those produced in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries under Mongol and Timurid rule. Other interests include the artistic interface of Eastern Christianity and Islam in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the figural buff ware of mediaeval Nishapur; and before retirement also curated the Creswell Photographic Archive at the Ashmolean Museum. Recent publications include articles on Jalayirid painting, the Freer Canteen, and depictions [...]
Honorary Member: Dr. Julian Raby
Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Smithsonian Institute, Washington, USA
Professor James W. Allan
Emeritus Professor of Eastern Art, University of Oxford, UK James Allan read his degree in classical Arabic at Oxford, and spent most of his career in the Ashmolean Museum as curator of the Islamic collections and latterly Keeper of Eastern Art. He also set up an Inter-faith Exhibition Service. For the last 6 years before his retirement in 2012 he continued to teach Islamic art in the Khalili Research Centre. He leads tours in the Middle East, and has published [...]