Amal Ghazal, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies Ahmed El Shamsy, University of Chicago Stephennie Mulder, UT Austin Finbarr Barry Flood, Silsila/NYU
Friday, March 5th, 12:00pm ET
[Online] Silsila Spring 2021 Lecture Series, Translations
In recent years the impact that Sunni reform movements had on the nineteenth-century Islamic world has attracted increasing attention. On the one hand, the austere reform movement popularly known as Wahhabism gained influence in the Arabian peninsula. On the other, an influential group of Salafi reformers based in Cairo made use of print media to communicate their idea of reform to a global community of Muslims. Both groups sought to regulate the role of mediation and the materiality of devotional practices in Islam.
The reaction to both sets of reformers on the part of those Muslim scholars and thinkers who espoused the principle of taqlid, the need to follow established convention and tradition, has attracted far less attention. Many such thinkers were also sufis who promoted and supported material forms of devotional practice, including shrine visitation and respect for relics. Often dismissed as conservatives at odds with modernization (if not modernity), in fact these traditionalists often negotiated a de facto middle ground between the status quo and radical reform.
This panel considers the life and thought of one of these conservative thinkers, Yusuf al-Nabhani (d. 1849-1932). Born in Palestine, al-Nabhani was a Sunni scholar and sufi who promoted devotion to the Prophet Muhammad. A passionate supporter of the Ottoman caliphate, a scholar and judge, al-Nabhani was a fierce opponent of the reformist trends that sought to shape the world that he inhabited. The panel seeks to acknowledge the role that visions of ‘conservative modernity’ such as al-Nabhani’s played in the intellectual and religious life of late Ottoman Palestine and Syria, and the impact that they had in regions far beyond, from Anatolia and Arabia to East and North Africa.
12.00-12.30 Amal Ghazal, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, “Between Conservatism and Anti-Liberalism: Yusuf al-Nathani and Wahhabi Polemics”
12.30-1.00 Ahmed El Shamsy, University of Chicago, “Al-Nabhani and the question of religious authority”
1.00-1.30 Stephennie Mulder, UT Austin, “Abdülhamid and the ʿAlids: Ottoman patronage of “Shi’i” shrines in the Cemetery of Bab al-Ṣaghir in Damascus”
1.30-2.00 Finbarr Barry Flood, Silsila/NYU, “Al-Nabhani and the Image in the Modern Era of Technological Reproducibility”
Amal Ghazal earned her BA from the American University of Beirut and her MA and PhD from the University of Alberta. She was the director of the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and is currently the Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.
Ahmed El Shamsy is an associate professor of Islamic thought at the University of Chicago. He studies the intellectual history of Islam, focusing on the evolution of the classical Islamic disciplines and scholarly culture within their broader historical context. He is the author of The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History and Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition.
Stephennie Mulder is Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin and is President of the Middle East Medievalists Organization. She is a specialist in Islamic art, architectural history, and archaeology. She worked for over ten years as the head ceramicist at Balis, a medieval Islamic city in Syria, and has also conducted archaeological and art historical fieldwork in Syria, Israel Egypt, Turkey, and elsewhere in the region. Dr. Mulder’s book The Shrines of the ‘Alids in Medieval Syria: Sunnis, Shi’s and the Architecture of Coexistence, published in 2014, received numerous awards. She has also published on matters related to heritage preservation and the trade in looted antiquities. She has appeared in media interviews and written editorials for media outlets such as the BBC, IB Times, al-Jazeera, the L.A. Times, Huffington Post, and U.S. News and World Report on cultural heritage issues, Islamic art, antiquities, and the history of sectarian relations in Islam.
Finbarr Barry Flood is director of Silsila: Center for Material Histories and William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the Humanities at the Institute of Fine Arts and Department of Art History, New York University. He teaches and publishes on intercultural dimensions of Islamic art, image theory, devotional art, technologies of representation, modernity and Orientalism. Publications include Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter (2009) and Technologies de dévotion dans les arts de l’islam: pèlerins, reliques, copies (2019). He is currently completing a book project, provisionally entitled Islam and Image: Contested Histories, which formed the basis of the 2019 Slade Lectures at the University of Oxford.
Co-sponsored by NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, and Department of Religious Studies.Date: Friday, March 5th Time: 12:00-2:30pm Location: Online
This event will take place as a live Webinar at 12:00pm ET (New York time). To register as an attendee, please use the following link: https://nyu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_PCQBcLSzQcWgkUkxngz7vQ Only registered attendees will be able to access this event.Silsila: Center for Material Histories is an NYU center dedicated to material histories of the Islamicate world. Each semester we hold a thematic series of lectures and workshops, which are open to the public. Details of the Center can be found at:
Although the Arts and Science College Learning Center has offered subject-specific assistance in the past and continues to do so in biology, chemistry, math, languages and the like, in recent years our own Department has taken the lead in providing art history-specific tutoring to its undergraduates. The program kicked off in October 2008 and, according to our students’ feedback, has proven to be a great success.
A tutor is available via Zoom on Mondays through Fridays from 9:30 am to 11:00 am and 12.30 pm to 2:00 pm. Contact gtortora@nyu.edu to schedule an appointment.
Charlotte Kinberger is a second year master’s student at the Institute of Fine Arts, focusing on modern and contemporary art of the Americas. Her research interests include revisionist histories of Modernism, material culture and design, and feminist and critical race theory. Charlotte completed her BA in Art History and Material Culture at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Oxford, and has held internship positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. Before attending graduate school, she served as the Gallery Manager at James Fuentes, New York, and the Assistant Director at Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco. Charlotte is available Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9:30 am – 11:00 am.
Alejandra López-Oliveros is a first year master’s student at the Institute of Fine Arts, focusing on contemporary art of the Americas. Her research interests include photography, critical theory, and intersectional feminism. She holds an MA in Art Museums and Gallery Studies from the University of Leicester and a BA in Art History from the University of Granada. She has previously worked at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow and CAMP in Copenhagen. Alejandra is available Mondays from 9:30 am – 11:00 am AND Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm.
Laura Bergemann is a first year M.A./M.S. student at the Institute of Fine Arts, focusing on the conservation of objects. Originally from Boston, MA, Laura completed her BS in Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2019. Prior to starting her studies, Laura worked at The Museum of Fine Arts Boston and The Rijksmuseum among other institutions. Laura is available on Mondays and Thursdays from 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm AND Fridays from 9:30 am – 11:00 pm.
Libby Fischer is a first-year master’s student at the Institute of Fine Arts focusing on 18th and 19th century European and American art with a particular interest in Aestheticism and public culture/ identity. Libby completed her BA in Art History with minors in Studio Art and Italian at Miami University in 2020. She has held internship positions at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and the London Museum of Architecture. She currently interns at David Tunick, Inc., a gallery that specializes in Old Master works on paper. Libby is available Wednesdays from 9:30 – 11:00 am.
Ink & Image, New York University’s journal of undergraduate research in the history of art, architecture, and urban design, recently published its twelfth, 2020 issue—and this, despite the challenges presented by the onset of the pandemic last spring. The articles published in each issue of Ink & Image develop out of term papers and other research conducted by students in advanced Art History and Urban Design & Architecture Studies courses, independent studies, and senior honors theses.
The journal’s editors for the 2019–20 academic year were Emily Conklin (Urban Design & Architecture Studies/Journalism ’20), Carola Reyes Benítez (Art History; Business Studies minor ’20), Xiaolu “Joy” Wu (Art History ’20), Benjamin Poleretzky (Journalism/Political Science ’21), and Amy Lenkiewicz (Art History ’20). As in many years past, Professor Carol Krinsky provided guidance and assistance as faculty advisor and editor. The board worked to ensure that Ink & Image 12 was published in digital format. You may read the twelfth issue on the journal’s website.
Three articles, all by current NYU undergraduates, appear in the twelfth issue. The authors and their essays are as follows:
Gia Chen (Art History ’21), “Tracing Scientific Thought in Two Medieval Herbals”
Marie Normand (Art History ’21), “Trujillo Racial Politics: Depictions of Blackness in Dominican Art”
Mari Sophia Õtsu (Art History ’21), “Restoring Integrity: How Kintsugi-ware Encapsulate the Vicissitudes of Time”
This year’s editorial team, which includes Co-Editors-in-Chief Anna Sujin Leckie (Art History, ’21) and Niall Finn Lowrie (Art History ’22), Editors Angie Tang (Gallatin ’21), Ann Lukyanova (Art History ’22), and Sunnie Zhang (Art History/Psychology ’21), and Layout Designers Clara Reed (Art History/Photography ’21) and Marie Normand (Art History ’21),
Ink & Image was founded in 2008-09 by department alumni Malcolm St. Clair (Urban Design & Architecture Studies ’09) and Alexis Wang (Art History ’09) with the goal of expanding the community of scholars at NYU by publishing original undergraduate research in the history and theory of art and architecture. Former College of Arts & Science Dean Matthew Santirocco and Dean Sally Sanderlin provided crucial support toward the launch of Ink & Image; the journal enjoys the sustained support of the CAS dean and administration and the Department of Art History. You may read about previous issues of the journal in our earlier posts.
Ink & Image is distributed to the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Getty Research Institute, as well as Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and Technical University in Dresden, Germany.
Hearty congratulations to the authors and editors on their splendid achievements. Please take the opportunity to read Ink & Image 12.
After I lectured at Pomona College last February, I was invited back this semester to deliver two lectures about cities, but this time virtually. I spoke last week about London and Paris,and will give the second lecture on March l about Manhattan. I’m also going to lecture on April 1 for the University of North Carolina on the subject of synagogue architecture in Europe. For two adult education organizations, one in Paris and one in Washington, DC, I’ll be delivering other lectures to retired professors, diplomats, and others on the subjects of Manhattan and contemporary Native American architecture. What would we do without Zoom?
A symposium that unfolds the history of the book as a material object through its interactive features.
About this Event
This symposium accompanies The Interactive Book, an exhibition curated by Dr. Julie Park, Assistant Curator and Faculty Fellow, NYU Special Collections.
About The Interactive Book
The history of the book is a story about the interactions between humans and a material object. Today’s digital books appear to bring to reading new levels of interactivity, with their touch screens, hyperlinks, and text annotation features. But the form and function of books have always entailed interaction, from wax tablets to pocket diaries and three ring binders, making the reader do things in the process of engaging with them. In showing how books have prompted specific actions from people through time, this exhibition reveals as much about books and their different parts as the lives and worlds of the people who owned, lived and interacted with them.
Dialing It In: Interactive Renaissance Shortcuts
Suzanne Karr Schmidt, George Amos Poole III Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts, Newberry Library
Premodern books with moving parts, (especially flaps and dials), aimed to impress with printed ingenuity, but also to simplify. Many offered solutions: whether for scheduling quandaries; for offering tactile learning; or even for planning one’s future. This talk touches on several intentionally hands-on publications whose authors delivered the very latest improvements for the sake of their reader’s edification and amusement.
Interacting with Early Modern Recipe Books
Marissa Nicosia, Assistant Professor of English, The Pennsylvania State University – Abington College
What would happen if we approached recipe books as usable cookbooks? This paper takes up this question by considering cooking as a method for manuscript study and presenting examples from my ongoing Cooking in the Archives project. Since I started the project in 2014, I have become increasingly interested in cooking as an interpretative practice. In this paper, I will reflect on cooking as a method for understanding historical recipes now as well as in their original contexts. To do this, I will bring together frameworks from disparate fields: ethno-bibliography, embodied ethnography or carnal sociology, and work on historical reenacting and historical interpretation. I will argue that cooking is not only a valuable method for recipe studies, but a method that we cannot ignore if we are invested in thinking about histories of book use.
Before Pop-Ups: Children’s Interactive Books in the 18th and 19th Centuries
Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, Associate Professor of Education (Language & Literacy Education) and Women’s Studies, Penn State University, State College
Many people today associate the modern pop-up book with children, and often use the term to refer to all types of movable books for this market. Yet they often don’t realize that for hundreds of years books with movable components have been directed towards Anglo-American children for education and pleasure. In this talk I examine several notable kinds; 18th-century turn-up books, also called metamorphic pictures or harlequinades; early 19th-century paper doll books with movable heads; and complex, late 19th-century “mechanical books.” I examine the affordances of each type: flaps and accordion folds, tabs and slots, and combinations of two- and three-dimensional devices. In each case the actions of the book are controlled by the child reader-viewer-player or interactor.
Selfing in the Postcard Album
Gabrielle Dean, William Kurrelmeyer Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University
The modern picture postcard developed in the late nineteenth century as an expression of new governmental, technological, and commercial possibilities: postage costs and mail services; printing and photography; tourism and travel. The picture postcard offered a new medium not just for communication but, through its image options, self-expression. Often, nineteenth-century postcard collectors gathered their bounty into albums, to exist alongside or in combination with other kinds of paper-based personal collections: photographs in photo albums; resonant ephemera in scrapbooks; signatures, poetic extracts, and other textual mementoes in friendship albums. The postcard album references and in a sense incorporates a mode of interactivity—the writing and sending of postcards—that other albums don’t offer, supplementing that primary mode with another, the construction of a “book” through the curation and management of widely available material. “Selfing” in the postcard album is a process that does not lend itself to a final product—and the interactivity these albums facilitate is, likewise, both more constrained and more open-ended.
All presentations are hosted on Zoom. Live closed captioning will be available.Image: Hebrew Calendar Book, 1722, NYU Special Collections.
This is a free public panel on archives and documenting the pandemic, co-organized by Urmila Mohan and NYU Libraries. Live closed captioning will be available.
Aspects of the pandemic that have become ubiquitous include the usage of masks, social distancing and restrictions on travel, entertainment, and dining. We’ve also borne witness to the further unraveling of our social structures as inequities in our healthcare, education, and justice systems have become starkly evident. While news media refer to our ability to ‘pivot’ to the new normal, the reality of our lived experiences reveals uncertainty as to how to cope, understand and/or record the pandemic’s effects. This conundrum is also present in university libraries and the ways changing forms and types of information engender new debates on archives.This panel invites on-the-ground community activists to share their experiences of building and growing mutual-aid efforts in response to the COVID-19 crisis. It will also examine how archivists and curators are making and sustaining a wide range of pandemic-era archives including objects and images to document the work of community activists in the last year. By creating dialog between activists, NYU librarians, archivists, and curators, this panel asks how we can better respond to a world reshaped by the pandemic. PANEL
Kristina Wong, Performance Artist, Elected Representative in Koreatown, Los Angeles & Overlord of the Auntie Sewing Squad.
Zenat Begum, Owner of Playground Coffee Shop & Founder of Playground Youth.
Shannon O’Neill, Curator for Tamiment-Wagner Collections, NYU Special Collections.
Nicole Greenhouse, Web Archivist, NYU Libraries.
MODERATOR
Giana Ricci, Librarian for the Fine Arts, NYU Libraries.
Dr. Dipti Khera In conversation with Dr. Anandi Silva Knuppel, a media specialist working with the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), and Dr. Deborah Hutton, Professor of Art History at The College of New Jersey, about AIIS fellowships, workshops, and book prizes for emerging scholars. Dipti Khera held an AIIS Junior Fellowship in 2009–10, and her recent book The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur’s Painted Lands and India’s Eighteenth Century was awarded AIIS’ 2019 Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize for the best unpublished book manuscript in the Indian Humanities, February 16, 2021.
You can also read about companion website Professor Khera developed for The Place of Many Moods. It makes the seventy-two feet long and eleven inches wide painted letter sent from Udaipur to an eminent Jain monk in 1830 accessible for research across disciplines. “Material unfurling, digital scrolling, urban strolling, c. 1830–now,” Princeton University Press Ideas Blog (January 14, 2021).
Dr. Dipti Khera in conversation with Shrishti Malhotra, producer at The Swaddle, about the cultural importance of eighteenth-century Indian art, what lake palaces tell us about the relationship between pleasure, water, and politics, December 21, 2020.
A conversation at the Institute of Fine Arts-NYU about The Place of Many Moods, with responses by Dr. Vittoria Di Palma, Associate Professor of Architectural History and Art History at the University of Southern California, and Dr. Kavita Singh, Professor of Art History at the School of Arts and Aesthetics of Jawaharlal Nehru University, December 4, 2020. https://vimeo.com/488553503
Thursday 18 February 2021, 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm GMT, 12:00 – 1:00 pm EST, Architecture Cultures, Courtauld Asia, Global Early Modern: Connecting Cultures, Research Forum, The Courtauld Institute of Art
The Mood of a Place: A Sensible History of India’s Eighteenth-Century Locals and Locales
Friday 26 February 2021, 1:00 pm CT, 12: 00 noon ESTMurphy Lecture Series, “Intersections of Identity: Expression, Exchange and Hybridity,” Kress Department of Art History, University of Kansas “Archive/Agency/Argument: Mobilizing the Knowledge of Colonial India’s Native Artists in ‘Global’Art Histories” Watch via KU Art History Channel on Youtube: https://bit.ly/HAtube21
Kelly Ryser (Art History/Urban Design & Architecture Studies; Sustainable Urban Environments minor ’19) will deliver a lecture this coming Tuesday, 2/23 on “Calamity in Cairo: Architecture in the Wake of the Black Death.”
Ryser is currently pursuing a Master’s in Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts. Both Ryser’s lecture and a lecture by Sarah Cohen, “The Cherub-Door: The Origins and Application of a Byzantine Salvation Motif,” are part of the virtual talk series “Apocalypse and Revelation” organized by NYU’s Medieval and Renaissance Graduate Interdisciplinary Network (MARGIN). The two lectures begin at 2:30 PM. To register and receive a Zoom link, please fill out this form.
Fields of Vision 