International Women’s Day 2022

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]