Race & Gender in Islamic Art and Visual Culture

Generously supported by Oberlin College’s Art History Department and the University of Michigan, this two-day symposium will bring together leading experts who seek to acknowledge the ways in which race and gender converge and jointly impact codes of representation in Islamic image-making practices over time. Exploring the artistic traditions of the lands of Islam writ large—from the Middle East to the United States and from the medieval period to today—the papers address the question of how the visual cultures of the Islamic world can help expand, refine, and problematize the intersections of race and gender beyond Euro-American spheres.

Art credit: Miniature from a copy of Kitab al-hashaish, an Arabic translation of Dioscorides’s De Materia Medica. ‘A Ferry Crossing the Gagos River’ 1224, Baghdad (?), Iraq. Pigment and ink on paper, 32.2 × 24 cm. The David Collection, inv. no. 5/1997.