Karame

Topic: The “Qarmathian” Qur’an: From the Mausoleum to the Museum

Speaker: Alya Karame, American University of Beirut
Respondent: Umberto Bongianino, Oxford University

Alya Karame is currently a research affiliate to the Fine Arts and Art History Department in the American University of Beirut where she previously held the Mellon Postdoctoral fellowship in 2019-20. In 2018-19, Karame was a postdoctoral fellow, supported by the Barakat Trust, in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford. In 2016, she joined the Kunsthistorisches Institut research program in Florence Connecting Art Histories in the Museum and was based for two years at the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin. She obtained her PhD in 2018 in Islamic Art History from the University of Edinburgh and her MA in History of Art & Archaeology from the School of Oriental and African Studies in 2011. Her work has been supported by the Historians of Islamic Art Association (Grabar Postdoctoral Grant), the Arab Funds for Arts and Culture (Research on the Arts Program), and the Forum Transregionale Studien (Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices). She has been lecturing widely on the Qur’an manuscript and leading workshops in museums and academic institutions. She is currently working on her first book project in which she touches upon an understudied corpus of medieval Qur’an manuscripts, investigates the materiality of the Qur’an and challenges established biases in the field.

Monday, October 25, 2021