Celebrating Women in Islamic Arts, Heritage and Culture
To celebrate, International Women’s Day we have selected women, who over the last 35 years have received grants from The Barakat Trust, or have guided the charity as a Trustee or an Academic Advisory Committee Member.
All the these women have made significants contributions in their chosen field of studies or to the future of The Barakat Trust.
Kirsten Scheid
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 [...]
Aziza Shanazarova
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 [...]
Eloïse Brac de la Perrière
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 [...]
Associate Prof. Dr. Mandana Barkeshli
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 [...]
Dr Francesca Leoni
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 [...]
Dr. A.Hilal Ugurlu
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 [...]
Dr Alison L. Gascoigne
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 [...]
Dr Micaela Sinibaldi
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 [...]
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 Gizem Tongo
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 [...]
Jody Butterworth
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 [...]
Corinne Mühlemann
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 [...]
Iman R. Abdulfattah
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 [...]
Agnieszka Dobrowolska
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 [...]
Margaret S. Graves
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 [...]
