I am an art historian working in the field of post-colonial museology of Islamic art. My current research examines the intersection between museums, cultural heritage, cultural representation and nationalism. I am also interested in an expanded field of Islamic art, in particular Southeast Asian Islamic art.

Ken Garden received his doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2005. He is the author of The First Islamic Reviver: Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī and his Revival of the Religious Sciences (Oxford: 2014). His current research centers the development of Sufism in North Africa and Muslim Spain in the 12th and 13th centuries. He also has a website that presents and analyzes examples of religious discourse from different currents in contemporary Egyptian Islam.

Ph.D. candidate, History of Islamic Art, Tehran University of Art

Renata Holod is Professor, and Curator in the Near East Section, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. She received her BA in Islamic Studies from the University of Toronto, MA in the History of Art from University of Michigan and Ph.D. in Fine Arts from Harvard University. She has done archaeological and architectural fieldwork in Syria, Iran, Morocco, Central Asia and Turkey, and on the island of Jerba, Tunisia. Her most recent project is a collaborative study of the grave goods of a Qipchaq kurgan in the Black Sea steppe of the thirteenth century.

Noora Lori’s research broadly focuses on the political economy of migration, the development of security institutions and international migration control, and the establishment and growth of national identity systems. She is particularly interested in the study of temporary worker programs and racial hierarchies in comparative perspective. Regionally, her work examines the shifting population movements accompanying state formation in the Persian Gulf, expanding the study of Middle East politics to include historic and new connections with East Africa and the Indian subcontinent.

Kristian Petersen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and co-director of the Islamic Studies Program at the University of Nebraska Omaha. He is on the advisory board for the forthcoming Introductions to Digital Humanities: Religion series published with De Gruyter, and is co-editing Introductions to Digital Humanities: Research Methods in the Study of Religion with Christopher Cantwell. He is Assistant Director of MRB Radio at Marginalia Review of Books where he hosts a podcast called Directions in the Study of Religion and contributes to the First Impressions series. As the host of the New Books in Religion and New Books in Islamic Studies podcasts he discusses exciting scholarship with authors of new books. His first book is Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently editing a collection for the Mizan Series with ILEX Foundation, Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology, and writing a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims.