Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online is the first and only free and open-access platform dedicated to the scholarly study of Islamic art history. Founded and directed by Prof. Gruber, Khamseen is run by an international, multireligious, and intergenerational team based in Ann Arbor, Cairo, and Edinburgh. The website features over 80 multimedia presentations by 60 scholars worldwide. It has received a quarter of a million views in three years and is the most technologically complex and data-heavy website hosted by LSA. Khamseen strives to present academic research in an accessible and engaging manner, feature a variety of voices, and pioneer new models to learn about Islamic art history and visual culture across the globe.
Having established the website as a crucial and peerless resource in the field, Khamseen is now moving forward in increasingly innovative directions. Two-thirds of the ARIA grant will support Khamseen's scaling up and production of new presentations, and one-third will support two large-scale, digitally-born exhibitions about the life of an Iranian shrine from medieval times to today and early 20th-century revolutionary postcards from the Middle East. Both exhibitions present hard-to-access sites and objects, challenge the exclusionary nature of physical shows, apply new methods of curation, and ensure that scholarship is seen, used, and read by scholars, students, communities, stakeholders, and public audiences. Each project's team includes a dozen international scholars straddling history, art history, anthropology, religious studies, the digital humanities, and science.
