Biography
I am a trained architect and historian of medieval and early modern art and architecture in the Islamic world, with a focus on cultural exchange across the Indian Ocean. Before joining Cambridge, I was Senior Lecturer in Islamic Art at the University of Sydney. I have held research and curatorial positions with the Getty Research Institute, Australian Research Council, American Council of Learned Societies, Kunsthistorisches Institut (Max-Planck-Institut) in Florence, the Forum Transregionale Studien and Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin, and the British Museum.
My research interests span Sufi material cultures, the spatial poetics of epigraphy, replication as an artistic and intellectual endeavour traversing architecture, painting, and material culture, and the migration of objects and artistic networks in the Persianate and Indian Ocean worlds. My recent monograph Intimacies of Global Sufism: Ne'matullahi Shrines and Material Culture between Iran and India (Indiana University Press, November 2025), addresses the relationship between mysticism, materiality, and mobility. Focusing on a transcultural network of significant but hitherto understudied Sufi shrines in Iran and India, the book uses the concept of "intimacy" to redraw the boundaries between small devotional spaces and monumental structures, as well as between local and global histories of faith and art making. Intimacies of Global Sufism is the recipient of College Art Association’s Millard Meiss Publication Fund, The Barakat Trust Publication Award, The New Foundation for Art History Publication Subvention Grant, and the Persian Heritage Foundation Publication Grant. I am currently working on two new projects. The first, for which I received a Discovery Early Career Research Award from the Australian Research Council, focuses on monuments in fifteenth-century India that claim a relationship with the Ka‘ba in Mecca, the most significant site of pilgrimage for Muslims. The second project, for which I received a Getty Scholar Grant (2022-23), explores the real and imagined migrations of the coco-de-mer nutshell, native to the islands of Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, with a focus on their use as Sufis' begging bowls.
I am committed to hands-on, object-based teaching that engages with urgent methodological questions in the field of Islamic and global art histories. I believe in an art history that is both rigorously historical and deeply engaged with current social and political issues. Teaching in a field that is rethinking its canon, historiography, and museum collections with ever greater intensity, my pedagogical strategies embrace debates over the political entanglements of the field – from iconoclasm and Islamic extremism to Islamophobia and issues around cultural restitution. I welcome graduate students interested in all aspects of Islamic art, architecture, and material cultures, but especially those planning to study Iran, South Asia, and more broadly, the Indian Ocean world in medieval and early modern times.
Publications
Intimacies of Global Sufism: The Neʿmatullahi Shrines and Material Culture between Iran and India. Indiana University Press, 2025.
‘Translating Desire: Safavid and Ottoman Daggers in the Venetian Imaginary,’ co-authored with Robert Brennan, I Tatti Studies 28, no.1 (2025): 81-111.
‘Pushesh-e qabr (tomb cover),’ catalogue essay in The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin: An Online Exhibition of an Iranian Shrine, directed and edited by Keelan Overton, 33 Arches, 2024. Host: Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online.
‘Mahmūd Shihāb al-Dīn Bahmanī,’ in Encyclopaedia of Islam THREE, edited by: Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Devin J. Stewart, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2023, 61-65.
‘Sufi lodge,’ Handbook of Sufi Studies: Sufi Institutions, edited by Alexandre Papas, Brill, 2021, 157-173.
‘Dynastic Self-fashioning and the Arts of the Pen: Sufi and calligraphy networks between fifteenth-century Shiraz and Bidar,’ in Iran and the Deccan: Persianate Art, Culture, and Talent in Circulation, c. 1400-1700, edited by Keelan Overton, Indiana University Press, 2020, 145-174.
‘Beyond Centre and Periphery: Islamic Art in Sydney,’ The Journal of the Asian Arts Society of Australia 29, special issue: Islamic Art in Australia, edited by Samer Akkach (2020): 7-8.
‘Convention and Reinvention: The British Library Shahnama of 1438,’ Iran 57 (2019): 49-70.
‘Between the Spiritual and Material: The Niʿmatullahi Sufi Order’s Institutionalisation and Architectural Patronage in the 9th/15th Century,’ in Shi’i Islam and Sufism: Classical Views and Modern Perspectives, edited by Denis Herman and Mathieu Terrier. London and New York: I.B. Tauris and The Institute of Ismaili Studies (Bloomsbury Publishers), 2019, 123-155.
‘Sacred Kingship in the Garden of Poetry: Ahmad Shah Bahmani’s tomb in Bidar (India),’ South Asian Studies 31, special issue: Divine Intervention: The Role of Religion and Ritual in South Asian visual culture, edited by Rachel Parikh and Imma Ramos (2015): 187-214.
‘Al-Muqaddasi’s Ahsan al-Taqasim fi Maʿrifat al-Aqalim and its contribution to the study of architectural history in the tenth century,’ in Studies on the Iranian World II: Medieval and Modern, edited by A. Krasnowolska and R. Rusek-Kowalska. Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2015, 241-254.
‘Narratives of Nasir Khusraw: On History of the Built-Environment in Early Medieval Cities on the Edge,’ St. Andrews Journal of Art History, Museum, and Gallery Studies 15 (2011): 89-98.
