A Bridge to the Sky: The Arts of Science in the Age of ‘Abbas Ibn Firnas (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
I’m very happy to share the new title and cover design of my book, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
The original title was A Caliphal Daedalus, which I love. It will probably always be A Caliphal Daedalus in my own mind, but in the end I decided to choose a less obscure title, one that I hope will welcome people in and spark their curiosity to know more.
I love the new title as well though, and I think it makes a nice pairing with the cover image. If you’re curious, that’s not Ibn Firnas but rather Daedalus, as imagined by Andrea Pisano in the 14th c. It once decorated the Campanile in Florence. So Daedalus hasn’t been lost entirely…
Many thanks to my editors, Sarah Humphreville and Chelsea Hogue, who suggested both the new title and the image! And thank you also to my colleagues, friends, Digital Lab team and loved ones who served as a focus group for this important decision.
This year I’ve been busy in the Digital Lab, going back to my old experiment with using the Unity video game engine to visualize a medieval Islamic villa.
Why am I going back to research I started way back in 2010 or so??
Because video games are one of the most popular ways that people engage with the past today. That’s what makes them potentially a wonderful place to introduce people to times and places that may be unfamiliar, like 10th c. Cordoba.
I’m curious about how immersive game technologies can be used not only as a research tool for visualising the past, but also as a way to make historical research accessible to non-academic audiences.
I spoke about the new project in March at the Medieval Academy of America, and wrote about it on the Creative Informatics Research Blog, which you can read here.
Video games are one of the most popular ways that people engage with the past today. How can immersive game technologies be used not only as a research tool for visualising the past, but also as a way to make historical research more accessible to audiences outside the academy? My reflections on the first phase of work on Digital Munya 2.0 is available on the Creative Informatics Research Blog here.
An open letter to students in the School of History of Art, University of Edinburgh
In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in the US and around the globe, I took part in a discussion with some of you about where the School of History of Art stands on the BLM movement and systemic racism, and on equality, diversity, and inclusion. I want to continue that conversation here, and I want to thank those students for initiating it. I’m going to speak about my background and experiences as a mixed BAME scholar, which as a group represents a small fraction (around 1.2%) of UK academia. This is not something I would have considered doing before, but students have said hearing directly from BAME members of our community is important to them and I understand the significance of visibility. People come to Higher Education with varied backgrounds and experiences. Acknowledging this diversity and its implications is part of the anti-racist work necessary to make universities more just, inclusive, and equitable.
I’m from the Philippines, which has a complicated history of Spanish and Anglo-American colonialism. My father is white and was in the US military. I’m shaped by those national and transnational histories and by legacies of empire and war. I’m the first person in my immediate family to go to graduate school and the first to get a PhD. When we moved to the US, after living in the Philippines and then in Italy, where my dad was stationed, I didn’t fit in at all in our small rural town. I looked different, I sounded different. As a kid at school I got used to being asked: “Are you Oriental?” and “Are you mixed?” And I felt different. I was geeky, I didn’t care about American football, and my family and I didn’t have a long history in that place. We didn’t have money. But my parents passed on their love of reading to me very early and that made the difference. I read. A lot. I spent all my free time in the library reading. Jane Austen novels, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, all the Tolkien, Dante’s Inferno … you get the picture.
I’m a product of a public school system that was probably ranked near the bottom in the US, academically, at that time. But my parents believe deeply in the power of education and they passed that on to me. I also had excellent teachers who represented diversity in our community and who supported and inspired me. I knew that I would go to university, but also that I would probably have to pay for it myself. When I did go to university I didn’t go away to a prestigious institution, even though I would have liked to. Instead I went to the small state university in my hometown, because I could live at home and work to pay tuition. You might have read about the law professor who used her legal expertise to educate students who criticised her Black Lives Matter t-shirt. I’m proud to say she’s an alum of my old alma mater. I had excellent professors at that university. They and many others in my family and in my community inspired and supported me.
My doctoral program was my first experience at an elite private institution. It was a difficult transition. Academically, I didn’t feel adequately prepared – becoming an art historian, let alone a historian of Islamic art, was not something I’d planned to do as an undergrad, or even as a postgrad, at first. But I felt at home in my doctoral institution because I was surrounded by immigrants who all came from outside the US. I no longer stood out for the way I looked or spoke. That was an amazing feeling, but I still didn’t quite fit in because by that point I was also a new parent with a 4-month old baby. For the first year or two I literally thought I was the only postgrad parent in the entire institution, which was difficult and isolating. But I did it with the support of my family. My mom left her small business to live with us for my first semester, to care for our son since my husband was also continuing his studies at the time. When she went home, he put his aspirations on hold to become a full-time at home dad, an experience so important for the three of us that there’s no way I can do it justice here. Our parents supported us in every conceivable way. Our families and friends cheered us on. Their support made it possible for me to not only be in that doctoral program but to thrive there.
I took the photo above twenty years ago, during my first research trip as a PhD student. It shows the Islamic visual language of a medieval palace in Seville, in Spain, with people providing a sense of scale. The two in the foreground are my mom and my son, who was not quite two years old at the time. She is leaning over to look at the Arabic inscription that he was pointing out. To our amusement he announced confidently that he could read the inscription, and that it said “Keep off the grass” – an unexpectedly intertextual reading based on one of his favorite books at the time!
I’m a historian of medieval Islamic art and architecture, a field that grew out of, and was an active agent in, colonial systems, with all the difficult and problematic issues that entails. I know that simply by being part of the academy I am a part of unjust systems of oppression and exclusion. But I also know that my work as an art historian has been shaped by my perspectives as a cis-female-introverted-parent-mixed-BAME-immigrant from a working-class family. I’ll say more about that in my next two posts for this social media residency.
In the wake of the BLM protests my broader academic communities have spoken out against the systemic injustices that recent tragedies have laid bare. It’s important and it means a lot to me that these groups have taken an open and a clear stance in support of anti-racism and the hard work required from all of us to make a more just, equitable, and diverse academy. Here are their statements:
Seeing the protests around statues and monuments here in Edinburgh and around the UK, I think about debates that have raged across the US. Before coming to Edinburgh I spent more than a decade teaching at one of the oldest public research universities in the US. In 2017 the Art History faculty wrote an open letter to the Chancellor, asking the university to remove the statue of a Confederate soldier, known as ‘Silent Sam’, from its prominent place on campus. The university administration chose not to support that effort, but students and other protesters kept up the pressure and eventually removed the statue themselves in 2018. Last month the Society of Architectural Historians, a group I have a long relationship with, released this statement supporting the removal of Confederate monuments, which I recommend reading along with Dell Upton’s 2017 blog post, written in the wake of the tragedies at Charlottesville (where I began my postgrad studies in History of Architecture).
To return to my work here in Edinburgh – I hope you’ve had a chance to look at our School’s Diversifying Art History reading list. Collaborating on this list with my colleagues was rewarding and I hope it will be a useful resource for anyone who wants to explore how and why Art History matters for issues that the BLM movement raises.
I want to end this post by pointing out two items I added to our reading list: Lyneise Williams’ Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture 1852-1932 (Bloomsbury, 2019) and her new interdisciplinary project, VERA (Visual Electronic Representations in the Archive) Collaborative. VERA is the first collaborative of art historians, archivists, librarians, researchers, engineers, and computer scientists working to build innovative and responsible archival practices around the visual and material cultures of communities of color. This book and this project, which has enormous implications for museums, archives, and collections, represent for me some of the most exciting and important work on race and ethnicity in the field right now.
I hope you’ll read the book, check out the website, explore the reading list, and find inspiration for your own work as art historians.
It’s been a very busy year! This is a quick update, to say that I’m officially on research sabbatical this term, working very hard to finish my book on ‘Abbas Ibn Firnas, his medieval ‘first in flight’, and science and visual culture in early Islamic Córdoba. Inshallah it will be published next year, so stay tuned!
In other news, on diversifying games: last year I spoke to friends and colleagues at AKPIA@MIT about Assassin’s Creed, the AC Discovery Tours, and why those of us with expertise in medieval Islamic architecture and visual culture should be collaborating with games developers (abstract here).
This year I had the chance, lending my expertise on the 11th century Islamic Mediterranean to History and Games Lab Edinburgh for their new tabletop game Lion Rampant: A Viking in the Sun – The Mediterranean Adventures of Harald Hardrada (thank you to H&GL’s Gianluca Raccagni for inviting me to collaborate). You can get a copy of the game here – do let me know if you play it! I’d welcome your thoughts on the Islamic content.
Cover image. For more info visit History & Games Lab Edinburgh at https://historyandgames.shca.ed.ac.uk/
The other thing I spoke with the MIT folks about was my desire to found a GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) lab, to diversify digital cultural heritage by creating content focused on Islamic art and history. So I’m happy to announce that earlier this year I founded the Digital Lab for Islamic Visual Culture & Collections! The Lab is exploring mixed reality technologies to create new experiences of Islamic spaces, objects, and histories. Contributing to the digital global cultural heritage landscape, its mission is making immersive experiences about Islamic art and history accessible to all. Stay tuned for more on that front – there are exciting collaborations up and running already, and I’ll post more about those as they develop in coming months.
This month I wrote a post about my experiment with a new (for me anyway!) digital tool and process in my fourth-year Stars, Robots and Talismans honours course. With support from the Uni’s very own Wikimedian-in-Residence, Ewan McAndrew, my students brought art history skills to the task of diversifying Wikipedia’s information on the history of science, technology and the occult. You can read my post about this experiment on Wikimedia UK’s site here. Check out Ewan’s work with the University of Edinburgh here.
“Figure for Use at Drinking Parties”, Folio from a Book of the Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices by al-Jazari (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
This term I’d fully intended to write about two ways I’m thinking about the issues of diversifying art history. With the demands of the last few months that didn’t happen, so I’ll just quickly say a few words about one, which I mentioned in my first post below. This is what I am thinking of as my Slow Research project, on Islamic visual culture of/and the Philippines. There probably is an actual Slow Research movement, but I call it this because I started this research as a PhD student, and have made only intermittent and sporadic process over the years, doing this research on the side as I worked to get a PhD (early on my mentor asked me which it was going to be, Spain or the Philippines?) then tenure, but always prioritising my research on al-Andalus and the early Islamic West.
Here I want to say thank you to András Riedlemayer, who first told me about Manila’s Islamic history and the existence of an Aga Khan Museum in Mindanao. That was the catalyst for my research into the Islamic visual culture and history of the Philippines. I thought of this work as a post-tenure treat to myself, and did a bit of research over the years (in Madrid in 2016 and before that, Paris in 2013) while carrying out work on my main projects on Islamic Spain. I thought I would focus on this after tenure, but as it turned out I had another monograph on al-Andalus that I wanted to write (and which I’m currently revising for publication) before I felt I could turn my attention to this Philippines research. I finally made progress over the past year. First, by attending a wonderful talk by Dr. Annabel Teh Gallop for the York Islamic Art Circle, and second by finally managing a research trip in the Philippines in February.
I arrived in Manila and left again before Covid was making headlines outside Asia. My first inkling of anything out of the ordinary was getting a call from KLM the day before my flight, advising that we had to be rerouted because Manila was not accepting flights from Taipei and we would therefore be going through Singapore instead. Anyway, long story short I’m extremely grateful I had the chance to carry out my research in the National Museum of the Philippines before all travel ground to a halt. I’m really grateful to colleagues in the museum who shared their collections, and I hope it won’t be too much longer before we can meet again. The photo at the beginning of this post shows the circa 1918 building in the museum complex, which houses the Anthropology and Archaeology collections where I was carrying out my research. Also known as the Museum of the Filipino People, it faces a monumental forty-foot tall bronze statue of the Muslim leader Chief Lapulapu, who killed Ferdinand Magellan on the Philippine island Mactan in 1521.
It’s going to take me a bit longer to get my current book finished and off my desk, so for now, here are the rough ideas I had going into the trip – much of it was upended, or proved to be just plain wrong, by the subsequent research, and the final sentence is quite embarrassing, but that’s research for you. It’s a process…
The relatively low visibility of the Philippinesin discourses about Islamic art is striking, even in contemporary discussions of Islamic art in Southeast Asia. Yet, archaeological finds unearthed in the archipelago attest to a rich Islamic visual culture that bears witness to the circulation of people and goods between the central Islamic lands, as well as East, South, and Southeast Asian territories from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. This material is overshadowed by material from Indonesia and Malaysia, whose Islamic visual culture fits more easily, perhaps, into traditional notions of Islamic art.
Moreover, the earliest 16th century Spanish encounters with Muslims in what is now Manila, and the subsequent conquest and colonisation of the Archipelago, likewise had a transformative impact on the visual culture of the Philippines. Does the earliest visual material documenting the Philippines suggest that the 15th c. conquest of Islamic Iberia informed the earliest Spanish perceptions of the Muslims they encountered in the Philippines? And beyond the first moments of colonial encounter, how did the Spanish colonial connection to the Philippines inform artistic developments in Spain in the 19th century? For example, the monumental Glass Palace which still stands today in the Retiro Park, Madrid was constructed in 1887 for the Philippines Exposition, serving as the setting for an exhibition of artworks and objects from the Philippines (now preserved in the National Anthropology Museum, Madrid). How did the concerns of 19th century Spanish scholars and collectors position the visual culture of the Philippines as a colonial subject within anthropological and ethnographic frameworks, and thus outside the realm of art history? How did this and other Spanish exhibitions of artefacts from the Archipelago compare to other instances in which 19th century European collectors acquired and displayed objects from Islamic lands, and which subsequently shaped museum collections and thus art history? This research will contribute a distinct perspective to current discourses on expanding the boundaries of Islamic art history, and to research on Spain’s legacies of colonialism and empire.
A silver lining of lockdown and all the online meetings has been renewing ties with distant friends and colleagues, like fellow alums of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. It’s always inspiring to hear what those in this community are up to because it’s a varied group – architects, designers, urban planners, as well as historians of Islamic art/architecture. I volunteered to share some of the issues that have been on my mind with the group this month, on the topic of Islamic architecture, videogames, and the need to diversify the online digital heritage landscape. I’ll be writing about these issues in future posts, in the context of my planned digital lab for Islamic visual culture, so more in due course…
My sincere thanks to the committee for this recognition. It means a lot to me to be in the company of scholars whose work has inspired me over the years. Thank you!
Cover, Glaire Anderson, Islamic Villa In Early Medieval Iberia (Ashgate, 2013)
