Beeta Baghoolizadeh
Research Fellow, September–December
Beeta Baghoolizadeh (PhD, History, University of Pennsylvania) is an assistant professor of History and Africana Studies at Bucknell University. She is currently working on her book project tentatively titled,
The Color Black: Visualizing Slavery and Abolition in Iran, 1800-1979.
The Color Black draws on visual, textual, and spatial sources to examine how the term “Black” came to take on different meanings throughout each phase of abolition, emancipation, and the lasting legacies of slavery. She also directs Ajam Digital Archive, a crowd-sourced archive of family life in the Persianate world during the twentieth century. Her visual project (Instagram: @diasporaletters) plays with memory and nostalgia through its focus on scenes from the mundane in Iranian life. She has shared her graphic illustrations in several venues, including her first solo exhibit in 2018. She is working with an animator on a short documentary film.
Elizabeth GuffeyResearch Fellow, September–November
Elizabeth Guffey is professor of Art and Design History and head of the MA program in Art History at the State University of New York, Purchase College. She is the author of
Retro: The Culture of Revival (Reaktion, 2006) and
Posters: A Global History (Reaktion, 2015). She is also co-editor of
Making Disability Modern (with Bess Williamson, Bloomsbury, 2020), and author of
Designing Disability (Bloomsbury, 2018). She is the founding editor of the peer-review journal
Design and Culture (Routledge). Her scholarly work has appeared in a variety of venues, including
Design and Culture,
Design Issues, and the
Journal of Visual Culture. As part of her efforts to bring design and disability studies to broad publics, she has also authored essays in a range of publications, including
The New York Times and
The Nation. She is currently working on two projects. The first,
Design for One: Prehistories of Knowing the New Inclusivity, examines a paradigm shift in current design culture. It argues for a new way of knowing disability, thus drawing on the dynamic emergence of “critical disability studies.” In so doing, it examines less widely known design histories and their impact on how—and for whom—the world is designed today.
Ali Karjoo-Ravary
Visiting Fellow, September–December
Ali Karjoo-Ravary is the Josephine H. Detmer and Zareen Taj Mirza Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at Bucknell University. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in Religious Studies and is currently working on his book project,
Muhammad’s Song: Politics, Performance, and Cosmology in the 14th Century.
Muhammad’s Song uses close study of Arabic, Persian, and Turkic manuscripts from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries to center the performative aspects of Islamic imperial power. It uses the small yet relatively prolific court of Burhan al-Din of Sivas (d. 1398 CE), a scholar-turned-king in eastern Anatolia, and its afterlife as a point of departure into the multilingual and multifaceted material, intellectual, and creative worlds that were the bedrock of later Muslim kingship. Karjoo-Ravary is also engaged in a collaborative multimedia project titled, “The Lighthouses of God: Mapping Sanctity Across the Indian Ocean,” which investigates the changing religious landscapes of Indian Ocean Islam through photography, film, and GIS. His other work looks at visual representation and iconography in medieval Sufism, science fiction and religion, and the interplay between architecture, print culture, and changing notions of religion in the broader Muslim world.
