UCLA Department: Art History
Country of Study: Tunisia
2023-24 FLAS Dissertation Fellowship
Expanding upon recent art historical scholarship that challenges the association of Islamic art with aniconism, this research studies the colonial Maghrib as a historical moment rich in narrative imagery directly engaging Islamic belief and history. In the 19th and early-20th centuries, many popular prints and paintings from the region represented stories from the Qur’an, epic poetry, folklore, Islamic history, and the lives local saints. This collective corpus amounts to a significant yet overlooked dimension of modern Muslim visual culture that, if given the scholarly attention it deserves, reveals the production of Islamic art to be a fundamentally hybrid and dynamic process. This project seeks to understand how these images—with their many references to the victories of Muslim heroes or the miracles of Muslim saints—relate to the circumstances of European colonial occupation under which they were made.