Greetings,

Registration is now open for Islamic Art History and the Global Turn: Theory, Method, Practice, the Tenth Biennial Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art, to be held November 11-13, 2023 in Doha at VCUarts Qatar. The event website contains a conference schedule, profiles of all conference speakers, and an extensive list of scholarly resources that address this Symposium’s guiding question – namely, how art history’s concerns with the global turn and calls for decolonial, diverse, inclusive, and equitable histories is shaping the field of Islamic art history.

The Symposium’s keynote address on November 11 will be given by Finbarr Barry Flood (Director of Silsila: Center for Material Histories and William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the Humanities, Institute of Fine Arts & Department of Art History at New York University).  It is titled Shifting Scales: Islamic Art History as Global Microhistory. On November 12 and 13, we will hear presentations from Talinn Grigor, Ellen Kenney, Sam Bowker and Karen Exell, and roundtable conversations on theory, method, and practice, with a special concluding conversation at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art on November 13 titled Curating in a Global Context: Works in Progress.  You will find biographical information about all Symposium speakers and the titles of their presentations on the event website.

We are looking forward to being back in person on the campus of VCUarts Qatar in November after holding the 2021 Symposium on Zoom. However, for those of you who are not in Doha or cannot travel to Qatar this fall, we will also be live-streaming the conference – the event registration page has options to register to attend in person or via live-stream.

As you may know, the HBK Symposium proceedings have been published by Yale University Press since 2009. The eighth volume, The Environment and Ecology in Islamic Art and Culture, is now available for purchase, with contributions by many of the speakers at the 2021 HBK Symposium, including T.J Demos, Huma Gupta, Nasser Rabbat, D. Fairchild Ruggles, Yusen Yu, and Rebecca Zorach. Enjoy! And as always, please don’t hesitate to write with any questions related to the event.

Sincerely,
Marisa Brown
Program Manager  
Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art 
mabrown@vcu.edu