Digital Humanities and Islamic Book Arts: A Conversation on Trajectories, Collaborations, and Opportunities

“Digital Humanities and Islamic Book Arts: A Conversation on Trajectories, Collaborations, and Opportunities”

Date: 19 December 2025

Time: 17:00

Venue: ANAMED, Beyoğlu

Speakers: Christiane Gruber, Emine Fetvacı, Evrim Binbaş, Selin Ünlüönen, Ünver Rüstem 

Moderator: Aslıhan Erkmen 
The study of Islamic book arts has developed substantially over the past century. From early (and ongoing) attempts to locate and reassemble dispersed manuscripts to the latest conservation and imaging techniques, the field of Islamic codicology has embarked on exciting new trajectories. In recent years, these include integrated digital technologies, such as animations and online dissemination, to further expand scholarship about and the teaching of Islamic manuscripts, calligraphies, and paintings. This panel of distinguished experts will engage in a wide-ranging conversation on the state of the field of Islamic and Ottoman book arts, as well as the various opportunities offered by the Digital Humanities—above all, the platform Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online and its open-access ethos. We will also discuss our unfolding collaboration with Khamseen and the Sadberk Hanım Museum, which will yield a set of hands-on digital “master classes” on a selection of the museum’s artwork that will be freely available to scholars, students, and the public at large in 2026.  

The in-person panel is open to the public. No registration is required to attend. 

Christiane Gruber is Mehmet Ağa-Oğlu Collegiate Professor of Islamic Art History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Founding Director of Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online. Her fields of interest include Islamic ascension texts and images, depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, book arts, codicology, paleography, architecture, and visual and material culture from the medieval period to today. Her most recent publications include her third monograph, The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images, and her edited volume The Image Debate: Figural Representation in Islam and Across the World, both published in 2019. 

Emine Fetvacı is the Norma Jean Calderwood University Professor in Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College. She is the author of Picturing History at the Ottoman Court (Indiana University Press, 2013) and The Album of the World Emperor: Cross-Cultural Collecting and the Art of Album-Making in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul (Princeton University Press, 2019) and the editor, with Erdem Çipa, of Writing History at the Ottoman Court (IUP, 2013). Among other venues, her articles have appeared in Art Bulletin, Ars Orientalis, and Muqarnas. She has held a Stanford University Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, as well as been a member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.  

Evrim Binbaş received his PhD degree from the University of Chicago and teaches at the Institute of Oriental and Asian Studies at the University of Bonn. He studies early modern Islamic history with a particular focus on the Timurid and Turkmen dynasties in the fifteenth century. His prize-winning first book, Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran: Sharaf al-Din ‘Ali Yazdi and the Islamicate Republic of Letters, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016. Currently, Binbaş is working on three different publication projects: a critical edition in Persian of Yazdi’s Zayl-i Zafarnama, The Timurid Dynasty: A Handbook, whose first volume is forthcoming in the autumn of 2025, and a monograph on the modalities of sovereignty in the late medieval period. He is managing a DFG-funded research project on genealogical trees written in Turkish, Persian, and Arabic between 1500 and 1922 CE. 

Selin Ünlüönen (PhD, Yale University, 2021) is the Sullivan Fellow in Art History at Wesleyan University. She is currently writing a book about how manuscript paintings shaped the court culture of sixteenth-century Iran. Other scholarly interests include Ottoman alphabet books and the representation of epigraphy in Islamic paintings, a theme explored in her article “Between the Artist and the Patron: Painted Inscriptions of the Khamsa of Shah Tahmasb,” included in Inscriptions of the Medieval Islamic World (2023). She has taught at Oberlin College and Princeton University. 

Ünver Rüstem is the Second Decade Society Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Johns Hopkins University. His research centers on the Ottoman Empire in its later centuries and on questions of cross-cultural exchange and interaction. He is the author of Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Princeton University Press, 2019), published in Turkish as Osmanlı Baroku (Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2025), and he has written essays on various topics ranging from Qur’ans with interlinear translations to the ceremonial framing of Ottoman mosques. At present, he is working on a new book entitled Turkish Habits: Ottoman Costume and the Art of Self-Representation.

Aslıhan Erkmen is an Associate Professor of Art History at Istanbul Technical University, where she also serves as the Art History Program Coordinator. Her main research interests include Islamic book arts, illustrated manuscripts, traditional arts and crafts, and intangible cultural heritage. With Şebnem Tamcan Parladır, she co-edited Zeren Tanındı Festschrift: Art and Culture of Books in the Islamic World (2022). She has contributed to numerous editorial projects, scholarly and popular publications in both English and Turkish, documentaries, and national/international research initiatives. Active in NGOs, Erkmen also practices the arts of katı? (paper cutting) and ebru (marbling).  

See poster at the Course Files Tab. (Image caption: Opening page of an alphabet book, calligraphed by İsmail Hakkı, 1268 AH / 1850–1851 CE. Sadberk Hanım Museum, Istanbul, Yazma 559.)