During my outgoing phase, I worked on my book proposal and the book itself preliminarily titled "The House of God and the Tomb of the Prophet: Images of Mecca and Medina in the Ottoman Empire (16th–19th Century)." I signed an advance book contract with a US university press, completed two chapters, and started working on the third one. During my incoming phase, I acquired reproduction rights for over one hundred images and completed all five chapters, introduction, and conclusion of my book. I will submit my manuscript to the publisher for review in less than half a year, after organizational work, copyediting, and the feedback of a few colleagues and my UHAM and U-M supervisors.
I also co-authored a book chapter for an edited volume on early modern Mecca and Medina images. This volume went under peer-review and is now in print. Furthermore, I have also been co-editing a volume based on papers presented at a conference that I co-organized in Vienna in November 2021 (Expanding of Islamic Art Historiography: The 1873 Vienna World’s Fair). This edited book will go under peer-review at a publisher soon.
In March 2024, I co-organized a second workshop on the popular Islamic prayer book Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt. We held the first workshop on the same topic in May 2019 and co-edited a special edition of the Journal of Islamic Manuscripts (2021, vol. 12) with selected papers from this workshop. The publication of the second workshop will be in book format and has been recently accepted by a publisher.
These past three years, I made progress on my book project and other publications thanks to collaborations with colleagues and the support of my supervisors. I conducted research in libraries and collections in Ann Arbor, New York, Philadelphia, London, Berlin, and Istanbul and acquired digital images and their reproduction rights for publications.
During Fall 2021 and Fall 2022 terms, while at U-M, I taught the course "Visual Cultures of Islam" as a part of the Digital Islamic Studies Curriculum (DISC), a course sharing program between Big Ten universities. I taught the course in-person for U-M students in Ann Arbor, while the University of Maryland students virtually followed the lectures in their classroom in College Park. Engaging with a multi-cultural student body from various disciplines and using digital tools, this course improved my teaching skills and also increased my knowledge about scholarship on Islamic art and architecture. At UHAM, I opened a seminar course titled “Painting in the Ottoman Empire” in Winter 2023/24. After two weeks, the course unfortunately got cancelled due to low enrolment.
In Winter and Summer of 2023 and Winter 2024, I co-worked with a curator on the display, objects labels, introductory texts, and video scripts for a future gallery of the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin. The museum closed for renovations in October 2023 and will reopen in a few years. Then the small gallery that I co-curated will enable the dissemination of my research to a large public.
Throughout the outgoing and incoming phases, I delivered seven talks for various academic and non-academic audiences on various aspects of my research, ranging from prayer books to prints, and from soundscapes to talismans. I presented a paper at an international conference and co-presented a paper at a workshop that I co-organized. These presentations helped me convert my research into forms and contents accessible to a diverse audience.
From February 2022 to May 2023, I took Arabic grammar and reading courses to enhance my research and linguistic skills. I practiced my German with apps and videos in Winter and Spring 2024 and took German courses in Summer 2024.
