Biography

Hello! I am an art historian of the visual and material cultures of the medieval Islamic world, with a special interest in Armenian, Byzantine, and Persian-Islamic artistic exchange and cultural encounters in medieval Anatolia, the South Caucasus, and the Eastern Mediterranean. I hold a Ph.D. in History of Art from Koç University, Istanbul. I am currently a College Fellow in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University, and will join the department as an Assistant Professor of medieval Mediterranean and Islamic art in the fall of 2025.

I am one of the founding members of Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, for which I serve as the Director of Digital Technologies, and an assistant editor at the International Journal of Islamic Architecture (IJIA). Before joining Northwestern, I was a Lecturer of medieval Mediterranean and Islamic art in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan where I also am an affiliated faculty at the Digital Studies Institute (DSI). I also was previously a Research Assistant in the Digital Islamic Studies Curriculum (DISC), and a Freer Visiting Graduate Student Fellow in the History of Art at the University of Michigan as well as a Visiting Doctoral Student in History of Art at Bryn Mawr College.

My research has been supported by various grants and institutions, including the American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT)’s Hanfmann Fellowship, SOAS-Getty Connecting Art Histories Research Project, Koç University’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for Late Antique and Byzantine Studies (GABAM), and The Digital Islamic Studies Curriculum (DISC) at the University of Michigan via a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. My dissertation, which I am currently transforming into a book, contextualized bronze mirrors within the lives of the inhabitants of medieval Anatolia by considering their various functions in personal adornment and their use in devotional, divinatory, and talismanic practices during the Seljuk period, i.e., between the late eleventh and early fourteenth centuries. My research interests also include the collection and display of Islamic art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the history of sports, environmental studies, digital art history, visualization, and game studies.