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Hybrid Event – Photography and Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean: Istanbul, Cairo and Ma'an – April 22

Roundtable

Hybrid Event – Photography and Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean: Istanbul, Cairo and Ma'an – April 22

Rutgers, New Brunswick
15 Seminary Place (Academic Building Rm. 4225), New Brunswick, NJ, 08901, United States
1:30 pm
04.22-04.22.22


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In celebration of the launch of the new book, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean (Indiana University Press, 2022), this panel focuses on the transformational role of photography in four careful case studies of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. The conditions of nineteenth-century modernity fundamentally altered an individual’s relationship to time, space, community, and matter, at both the macro and the micro level. Four of the book’s eleven chapters examine diverse ways in which the novel technology of photography contributed to the intense aesthetic negotiation with the conditions of modernity. From the role of Muybridge’s locomotion studies in the Ottoman capital to photographs of imperial tents on the Hijaz railway to photographs of a new mosque on Cairo’s skyline, these four papers break new ground by uniting the field of Islamic art history with the history of photography.

The event will be hybrid: held both in person and on Zoom. 
To attend via Zoom, please register at this link.
To attend in person, please email developingroom@gmail.com to RSVP a seat.
The schedule is US Eastern Time (EDT)
For more information, see the event page at this link.
To buy the book, click here.

Schedule:

1:30: Introduction
1:40: Participant Interventions
2:40: Break
2:50: Roundtable
4:00: Discussion with audience
5:00: End

Interventions and Participants:

“Osman Hamdi Bey and the Long Duration of History”
- Gülru Çakmak, Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“The Muybridge Albums in Istanbul: Photography as Diplomacy in the Ottoman Empire”
- Emily Neumeier, Assistant Professor of Art History, Temple University 

“Alabaster and Albumen: Photographs of the Muhammad Ali Mosque and the Making of a Modern Icon”
- Alex Dika Seggerman, Assistant Professor of Islamic Art History, Rutgers University-Newark

“Tents and Trains: Mobilizing Modernity in the Late Ottoman Empire”
- Ashley Dimmig, Wieler-Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in Islamic Art, Walters Art Museum.