Avinoam Shalem

Riggio Professor of the History of the Arts of Islam

Email: as4501@columbia.edu

Islamic art; Visual cultures; The Islamic world; Palestine; the Mediterranean; Near East; North Africa

Avinoam Shalem’s main field of interest concerns artistic interactions in the Mediterranean basin, migration of objects, and medieval aesthetics. He has published extensively on medieval Islamic, as well as Jewish and Christian art. Professor Shalem is the author and editor of ten books, including Islam Christianized (Peter Lang, second ed. 1998); The Oliphant (Brill, 2004); Facing the Wall: The Palestinian-Israeli Barriers (Walter-König, 2011); Facts and Artefacts: Art in the Islamic World. Festschrift for Jens Kröger on his 65th Birthday (Brill, 2007); After One Hundred Years: The 1910 Exhibition »Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst« Reconsidered (Brill, 2010); Die mittelalterliche Olifante (Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, Berlin, 2014). He has recently edited the books Constructing the image of Muhammad in Europe (Walter de Gruyter, 2013) and The Image of Muhammad Between Ideal and Ideology: A Scholarly Investigation (Walter de Gruyter, 2014), which introduce the readers to the complex history of the conceptualisation and pictorialization of the Prophet Muhammad in the West and the lands of Islam, from the early medieval times till the 19th century.

Professor Shalem has written more than one hundred articles on varied subjects including stylistic observations, document-based researches and cultural studies, historiographies and art criticism. He also researches and publishes on issues concerning Modernity in the Islamic world, especially in the Near East. He is currently directing the research projects When Nature Becomes Ideology: Palestine after 1947.