Radha Dalal is Interim Director of Art History and Assistant Professor of Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts in Qatar. She researches visual cultures of mobility and urbanism with a particular emphasis on the Ottoman Empire and its socio-political interactions with other European and Asian polities during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
She recently completed a major Qatar National Priorities Research project titled Museums in the 21st Century and Global Art History. She has served since 2016 as a member of the College Art Association’s Diversity Committee.
Dalal is a grant recipient of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Presidential Research Quest Fund for her current book project titled The Khilafat Movement and Print Media in British India and Ottoman Turkey, 1919-1924.
Sean Roberts is a Lecturer in Early Modern Art at the University of Tennessee. His research is concerned with the interactions between Italy and the Islamic lands, the cultural history of maps, and with the place of prints in the histories of art and technology. He is the author of Printing a Mediterranean World: Florence, Constantinople and the Renaissance of Geography (Harvard University Press, 2013) and is the co-editor of Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Truman State University Press, 2013).
His essays have appeared in numerous journals including Imago Mundi, Print Quarterly, Renaissance Studies, and the Journal of Early Modern History. Much of his most recent work explores the role of material culture in an increasingly global early modern world, including chapters in The Routledge History of the Renaissance (2017), The Globalization of Renaissance Art (2017), and The Cambridge Companion to Constantinople (2018).
Since 2017, Roberts has served as President of the Italian Art Society, an international non-profit organization dedicated to the study of Italian art and architecture from pre-history to the present day.
Jochen Sokoly is Associate Professor of Art History of the Islamic World at VCU’s School of the Arts in Qatar. He has recently been elected as board member of the Council of the Royal Asiatic Society, London. As Gallery Director at VCUQatar between 2004-2011 he curated exhibitions on contemporary art of the Middle East and lectures on the art of the Islamic World. He has been a research fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Royal Ontario Museum and has worked as a UNESCO curatorial consultant for the Al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait National Museum.
Sokoly’s research focuses on the culture of the Early Islamic caliphates, in particular on inscribed textiles within the context of court, administration and manufacture. More recently he has also worked on 18th century British India, particularly botanical paintings by the Indian painter Zayn al-Din from the collection of Sanskrit scholar Sir William Jones at the Royal Asiatic Society, and plans a study of the drawings of travelers Thomas and William Daniell.
