Revealing what is 'Islamic' in Islamic art, Shaw explores the perception of arts, including painting, music, and geometry through the discursive sphere of historical Islam including the Qur'an, Hadith, Sufism, ancient philosophy, and poetry. Emphasis on the experience of reception over the context of production enables a new approach, not only to Islam and its arts, but also as a decolonizing model for global approaches to art history. Shaw combines a concise introduction to Islamic intellectual history with a critique of the modern, secular, and European premises of disciplinary art history. Her meticulous interpretations of intertextual themes span antique philosophies, core religious and theological texts, and prominent prose and poetry in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu that circulated across regions of Islamic hegemony from the eleventh century to the colonial and post-colonial contexts of the modern Middle East.

This event will have a brief presentation of the issues addressed in the work. Subsequent discussion, hopefully driven through participant responses, will use this recent publication as an opportunity to discuss the frameworks through which we discuss cultures across temporal, spatial, and linguistic boundaries. What are the methods that we can develop to learn from rather than about "cultures"? To what extent do our subjectivities influence practices of research and writing? How do we complicate the boundaries of disciplines and knowledge through participatory recreation of their methods and function? This event invites the participation of anybody curious about this work at the intersection of Art History, Islamic Studies, and Comparative Literature.