Meet Our Team
The Global Past is a multidisciplinary, international research initiative.
We call upon researchers from several areas of expertise, both chronological and geopolitical,
to collaborate on this global challenge.
Our Core Team
Our core team comprises four dynamic people, two principal investigators and two project managers, who supervise the execution of The Global Past Research Initiative and its multi-year, national and international activities.
Ajay Rao
Co-Principal Investigator
Historical Studies
My fascination with global pasts grows from my passion for Sanskrit, a language that I fell in love with in my early twenties. As an undergraduate, I studied Sanskrit in Puna (India) with traditional scholars and was captivated by the language’s beauty. These classes were Sanskrit-medium, and by hearing and speaking the language I felt my study of the past coming alive in the present, rather than remaining buried in a dead past. The inherent complexity of its aesthetics and how it structured perspectives on the world resonated with me deeply and I was hooked on it. This engagement with the present animates my work as a scholar, and I have always sought to connect my research with contemporary political and social realities. The Global Past Research Initiative offers powerful possibilities for scholars like me, who are focused on highly technical and specialized fields, to bring our work into dialogue with researchers working with different religious, cultural, and intellectual archives.
Jill Caskey
Co-Principal Investigator
Visual Studies
Well before I became a historian of art and architecture, I was fascinated by the remains of the distant past and how they can tell stories about their makers and original users. My interests in medieval art emerged gradually and through other endeavors—writing, music, curiosity about places beyond my hometown in Illinois, studying cities as an undergraduate. For me, the appeal of medieval art lies in its strangeness and in the relative sparseness of its documentation; this combination of features sparks my creativity. I also relish the range of legibility and expressiveness in medieval art. Some works seem unforthcoming, offering few hints to the historian eager to uncover their stories; others loudly proclaim their significance in multiple ways—through form, inscriptions, images, and materials. In my work on the medieval Mediterranean, I have looked outside of canonical contexts to examine works of art, people, and ideas that are indicative of fluidity rather than fixity, contact rather than constraint. I look forward to exploring with Global Past participants these dynamics on a larger scale.
Aqsa Ijaz
Co-Project Manager
Language Studies
I am a self-professed lover of words (philologist), at a time when philology seems to have lost its conceptual currency in modern humanities. With a long history of various border crossings, I was born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan where I was trained as a pilot and a classical musician before joining academia. I studied English Literature, Philosophy, and French in Lahore, and went on to discover the fields of South Asian and Religious Studies in Germany and the United States before pursuing my doctoral studies at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University. As a medievalist, I am fascinated by the temporality of the past and diverse ways in which it elicits our scholarly and poetic attention. The drive to listen to and communicate the multilingual voices of the dead is at the heart of my academic and artistic work. It is this drive that has led me to write my doctoral dissertation on the 12th-century Persian poet, Nizami Ganjavi and the multilingual reception of his most celebrated love-poem Khusrau u Shirin in Persianate India. My research is geared toward challenging the methodological frameworks of European historiography and re-conceptualising the history of ideas from within the philological density of Islamicate India.
Alisha Stranges
Co-Project Manager
Women & Gender Studies
I am a queer, community-based, public humanities scholar with deep ties to the performing and visual arts. While Historical Studies proper has not been a central focus for me as an academic, public history, and particularly those projects that focus on preserving underheard or less visible histories, has always captivated my attention. As a theatre artist, I spent a decade devising original, collectively created performances drawn from the lived experiences of the queer, trans, and non-binary creators I worked alongside. As an undergraduate, student group facilitator at U of T, I spearheaded the anti-Archive Project, documenting the ephemeral evidence of the Qu(e)erying Religion program’s 10+ years of supportive programing for QTBIPOC students of faith. Most recently, as a project oral historian and a research manager for the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory (PI Elspeth Brown), I’ve refined and further mobilized this passion in a more formal, scholarly-grounded, yet still creative way. I am intrigued by The Global Past’s desire to build a framework for the research, study, and education of premodernity that de-centres Europe and privileges a decolonial and anti-imperial lens. As a scholar of gender and sexual diversity studies, it is always compelling to support work that explores the value of “leaked boundaries,” so to speak.
Our Graduate Research Assistants
Our graduate research assistants collaborate with the core team to support the planning and execution of our workshop series and the amplification of our research outcomes via social media and other digital media projects.
Sara Ameri
English
My interest in literature was sparked when I read Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace for the first time as a teenager; my fascination with medieval literature particularly was shaped by reading heaps of Arthurian romances (sometimes instead of attending classes!). I have since moved to study a wholly different kind of medieval literature: mystical and visionary writing. I am interested in the local contexts that produced these texts as well as the resonances they share across cultures. The other side of my scholarly, and sometimes leisurely, pursuits involve plagues and pestilences, especially the Black Death—a topic I started thinking about coincidentally a few months before the Covid-19 pandemic. I am fascinated by the different stories people tell themselves in different parts of the world to make sense of global crises and new diseases. How these stories vary, travel, and transform is what drew me to the Books and the Silk Roads project; it is also what I hope to explore further in the collaborative and multidisciplinary environment of the Global Past.
Katerina Bong
Architecture, Landscape & Design
I am an architectural historian with a special interest in building technology, infrastructure, engineering, and architectural manuals of the early modern Italy. I come from a family of engineers, my father studied civil engineering and my grandfather worked as a construction manager building dams, bridges, and highways in South Korea. Though unconsciously, this background slipped into my research which melded with my studies in art and architectural history. As a historian of the built environment, I am fascinated by the impulse towards sturdy buildings, stable cities, and a robust society (specifically the aversion towards failure, collapses, and defects) which functioned as a common driver for many civilizations across geographical and temporal scales. Many of these building knowledges were passed down as building manuals which recorded and illustrated building procedures, materials, and techniques. My doctoral dissertation examines building manuals in general, and European and Asian architectural knowledge in particular, to insert the artisanal, practical, and infrastructural knowledge as key tools of methodological enquiry in the study of the built environment.
Fahimeh Ghorbani
Art History
Growing up in Iran, I have always been surrounded by marvelous artifacts and splendid architectural monuments, palaces, mosques, bridges, and traditional bazaars. The magnificence and mystery of historic objects and ancient sites intrigued me from an early age and fascinated me with a language that I could not understand. My desire for deciphering that language and penetrating that enigmatic world of beauty and meaning led me to study traditional Iranian arts and crafts. My study examines the agency of objects and craft-making practices within the current discourses in the field of Islamic art and architecture. My research contextualizes the notion of craftsmanship within the intellectual landscape of the premodern Islamic world, in which making was often recognized as a form of contemplating and thinking. By connecting the manual processes of making with the intellectual realms, I trace a craft-oriented worldview that has its origin in medieval Islamic theology and philosophy. Methodologically speaking, my critical approach explores the need for developing a theory rooted in the culture-specific frameworks applicable to the study of Islamic art and architecture.
Our Toronto Collaborators
Our University of Toronto Team Members constitute the Toronto-centred base of the project, and support the work of our three research clusters.
Suleyman Dost
Historical & Cultural Studies
I thought I was going to become a political scientist or an international relations specialist. I don’t know exactly what happened along the way but here I am, working on early Islam and the Qur’an. I believe I was intrigued by the challenges posed by some scholars of early Islamic history who argued that we know way less than we thought we knew about the beginnings of Islam. Heeding their provocative siren call, I turned my attention to whatever scraps of material evidence we could have on pre-Islamic Arabia and eventually I got fascinated by the source-critical questions that fuel the study of other religions as well, especially in their formative periods. That’s why I believe the Global Past project is the kind of place where I can air some of my comparative questions and learn from scholars having similar challenges in their fields.
Alexandra Gillespie
English & Drama
I’m Vice-President of the University of Toronto and Principal of U of T Mississauga, where I’ve had the privilege to work as a professor of English and global book history for the past twenty years. I believe in the power of academic collaboration and community — and I love working with colleagues on big projects that make connections across different times, places, and research methods. So, my research and teaching range widely: from the poetics of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to the history of text technologies, from scientific approaches to book history to literary theory and philosophy. On these topics I have published about fifty articles and six co-edited volumes, plus an original monograph, Print Culture and the Medieval Author. I have also had the opportunity to join several international research networks, including as co-primary investigator of a Mellon-funded project, The Book and the Silk Roads, which culminated in 2021-22 in a public exhibit at the Aga Kahn Museum. My current research project — also supported by the Mellon foundation — is Hidden Stories, which brings together more than 130 collaborators from 60 institutions to develop new understandings of premodern books through their local and global relations.
Amanda Goodman
Religion / East Asian Studies
Amanda is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the transmission and spread of Buddhist tantra in the ‘borderland’ regions between China and Tibet during the 8th-12th centuries. Taking the Dunhuang manuscript cache as her primary archive, her work explores the ways in which tantric forms of Buddhist ritual were appropriated and altered along the Sino-Tibetan frontier, as well as in central China. Her work employs historiographical and text–critical methods, along with insights gleaned from ritual studies and the archaeology of the book, to discuss the production of Buddhist specialist knowledge related to techniques of personal cultivation in the pre-modern period, and the various formats used to disseminate that knowledge in the age of the Buddhist manuscript.
Maria Hupfield
Visual Studies / English & Drama
I seek a genuine, placeful connection with the local Nishinaabeg cultural knowledge and land on which I live and work. This connection begins by looking back at oral tradition and storytelling to provide an enduring, relevant, and continuous relationship in the present. By our nature Nishnaabeg Peoples are transdisciplinary, anticolonial, matrilineal, nonhierarchical, and grounded to “L”and, language and ceremony. Indigenous work does not conform to modernist western understandings of art as a depersonalized commercial product but rather argues for a deeper awareness of artistic creation existing as living culture by makers in an ongoing series of relations with community, places, ideas, and materials, that change contexts and intent in meaning-making. I am a member of the Nishinaabeg People and belong to Wasauksing First Nation in Ontario, Canada. As an Assistant Professor in Indigenous Performance and Media Art, Department of Visual Studies / English & Drama, and a Canadian Research Chair in Transdisciplinary Indigenous Arts, at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) where I run the Indigenous Creation Studio, I work to move traditional and digital art from the land to the classroom, into virtual space, both now and into the future.
Nyasha Junior
Religion
I’m an amateur and professional bookworm. I’m a Black woman who was born and raised in the Deep South of the USA. I’m a biblical scholar and an associate professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. My teaching and research address issues of gender, race, ethnicity and their intersections. At the heart of my work is a commitment to critical reflection and cross-disciplinary engagement regarding ancient Christian and Jewish texts and traditions and their reception. I combine my academic scholarship with public-facing work that helps me to reach a broader audience and contribute to public discourse.
Ruba Kana’an
Visual Studies
Growing up in Jordan was an immersive experience of a global past. I was surrounded by histories and cultures that were rooted there but always linked to elsewhere – other times, places, people, ideas, materials, and styles. I took mobility and intersectionality for granted and they stayed with me throughout my academic and professional career. Becoming a specialist in Islamic art and architecture is also an exercise in inhabiting multitudes. As an academic, I teach medieval and early modern art and architecture of vast regions in Asia, Africa, and Europe. As a museum professional I focused on the power of storytelling through objects as the connective tissue of human understanding and exchange. And as a researcher I work with artefacts, monuments, and texts to explore medieval artists and how they envisioned and created their work, patrons and the stories behind their grand gestures, and materials and how they were experienced and moved across time and space.
SeungJung Kim
Art History
SeungJung is an Associate Professor of Greek art and archaeology in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto. Her research involves concepts of time and temporality in the visual culture of Archaic and Classical Greece — in sculpture, vase painting, and monumental painting — which she contextualizes to the larger cultural history, bridging philosophical, social, literary and scientific understandings in ancient Greece. Moreover, her interest in the phenomenology of visual perception has engaged her actively with film theory, and more broadly with philosophy of history and theory of art history.
Jessica Lockhart
English & Drama
Jessica is the Head of Research for the Old Books New Science lab including The Book and the Silk Roads. Her research investigates the affect of wonder within medieval fictional writing, using “everyday marvels” such as a sports competition, a pillow, a lost puppy, a corpse, a puddle, and a field of sand to study how wonder is theorized and pressed into service in medieval texts. Her primary sources are texts from three imaginative genres — riddle, romance, and dream vision — from late antiquity in North Africa through to late medieval Britain. She is currently writing her first monograph titled, A Covered Quality: Medieval Riddles and Chaucer’s Fiction.
Heba Mostafa
Art History
Moving through a building or city has always had a profound impact on me. I often find myself totally engrossed in cityscapes, reading them like a book. In many ways, cities have been my classroom and laboratory. Growing up in Cairo, I had the opportunity to live and learn in one of the most fascinating global cities of the ancient and modern world. My background in architectural design has also deeply shaped the way I think about the past, especially how I approach vexing and longstanding historical problems mired in contested narratives. At the core of my practice is understanding how and why built environments form such an integral part of our human tendency to shape our reality through stories, which are often embedded in buildings and the natural world. I am especially interested in architecture that encodes high stakes, exploring how historical trauma, sectarianism, and environmental anxiety find resolution and are negotiated through the built environment. Thinking on a global scale with an international community is an exciting prospect. I look forward to the many opportunities this project affords to share experiences of immersion into global pasts, with all the contradictions, complexities and fascination that entails.
Karen Ruffle
Historical Studies
Karen is a Professor of History of Religions at the University of Toronto Mississauga and the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She specializes in the study of South Asian Shiʿism with a focus on devotional texts, ritual practices, and Shiʿi material practices in South Asia. She has conducted field research in India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and Syria. Her publications include Gender, Sainthood, and Everyday Practice in South Asian Shi’ism (2011) and Everyday Shiʿism in South Asia (2021).
Walid Saleh
Religion / Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations
Walid is a Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. He is a specialist on the Qur’an, the history of its interpretation (Tafsir), the Arabic manuscript tradition, Islamic apocalyptic literature, and the Muslim reception of the Bible. His first book, The Formation of the Classical Tafsir Tradition (2004), was the first monograph length study of al-Thalabi (d. 1035) and his influence on the history of Qur’an commentary tradition. His second monograph, In Defense of the Bible (2008), is a detailed study and an edition of al-Biqa`i’s (d. 1480) Bible treatise, “The Just Verdict on the Permissibility of Quoting from Old Scriptures,” which is the most extensive discussion of the place of the Bible in the Islamic religious tradition. He is also a specialist on Arabic paleography and teaches advanced courses on the manuscript tradition of Arabic written literatures.
Liye Xie
Anthropology
My natural curiosity about people and human cultures has followed me from the time I was an urban teenager studying among mostly suburban and rural peers in high school, to being southeastern Chinese Teochew people enrolled at Jilin university in northeast China, to becoming an archaeologist at the Institute of Archaeology in Beijing, on to being an Asian PhD student among predominantly Caucasian peers in Arizona, and eventually culminated in the Anthropology faculty at the University of Toronto Mississauga. I study preindustrial technologies that underwrote agriculture origins, urbanization, and social transformation during the Neolithic period and Early Bronze Age in different regions of China. My research often involves microwear analysis and intensive archaeological experimentation. Currently, I am focused on examining the impact of large earthworks in pre-Shang urban centers in the Middle Yellow River Valley, exploring how these structures and their construction processes not only reflected but also shaped both physical and political landscapes of the past.
Our International Collaborators
Across four institutions, our international collaborators and partners help us expand the scope of our central research questions beyond the contours of the North American academy.
Hugo David
Institut français de Pondychéry
Indology
Hugo is the Head of the Department of Indology, Institut français de Pondychéry. His main area of research is the history of Indian philosophical systems and traditions of linguistic analysis, with a focus on Sanskrit grammar, poetics and Vedic exegesis. His doctoral thesis, submitted in 2012 at the École pratique des Hautes Études (Paris), consisted of a critical edition, French translation, and study of the Śābdanirṇaya (“An Inquiry into Verbal Knowledge”) by the 10th-century Advaitin Prakāśātman. Before joining IFP, he was active at the University of Cambridge (2013-14) and at the Institute for the Intellectual and Cultural History of Asia in Vienna (2015).
Amina Elbendary
American University in Cairo
Arab & Islamic Civilizations
Amina is an Associate professor of Middle East history and Chair at the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations at the American University in Cairo (AUC). Her research interests include Mamluk social and cultural history, Arabic historiography, and Islamic political thought. Her publications include the monograph Crowds and Sultans: Urban Protest in Late Medieval Egypt and Syria (2015). This book explores reports of urban protest and dissent in the cities of Egypt and Syria under the late Mamluk and early Ottoman regimes and analyzes both the historiography of protest and the intricacies of urban politics in the late medieval period. She is currently working on a research project on popularization and late medieval historiography.
Smriti Haricharan
IIT Bombay
Humanities & Social Sciences
Smriti is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Her research areas include Iron Age-early historic archaeology, popular perceptions and relationships with the past, landscape archaeology, contemporary archaeology, and experimental archaeology. She has conducted field work in Chennai, Telangana, and Madhya Pradesh. She is also the author of Siruthavoor: An Iron Age-Early Historical Burial Site (2016).
Mrinal Kaul
IIT Bombay
Humanities & Social Sciences
The variegated and dynamic ‘lives of thinking patterns’ intrigue me; the camouflaged life of these robust and challenging ideas hides itself from our naked eye and we develop methods and insights — an eagle eye—to penetrate deep into their complex lives. I am interested in uncovering the concealed lives of these ideas in the history of South Asian thought. Being born and raised in Srinagar (Kashmir), somehow I got interested in the lives of these ideas in Sanskrit sources and thus became preoccupied with the Kashmirian Abhinavagupta (10th-11th CE) and his philosophical tradition. I began as a philologist and believe that philology shares an inherent relationship with philosophy. In the recent past my interests have grown to investigate how to think creatively using the South Asian sources of thinking. Situated in the South Asian context, why is it that we read ancient philosophy as a mummified category today? Does it have a contemporary creative life? My guide to thinking through these ideas is Abhinavagupta and his non-dual Śaiva philosophy.
Ellen Kenney
American University in Cairo
Arab & Islamic Civilizations
Ellen is an associate professor and chair of Islamic art and architecture in the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations at The American University in Cairo (AUC). Before joining the department in 2011, Kenney was a research associate in the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she researched collections and worked on preparations for the new galleries of Islamic art that re-opened in November 2011. Previously, she taught courses in Islamic art and architecture at New York University, Fordham University and the State University of New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology.
Our Graduate Students
Graduate students invited from five institutions, including the University of Toronto, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, American University in Cairo, Cairo University, and Ain Shams University, work across various disciplines. They are selected based on their innovative research methods, which not only challenge existing paradigms of premodern inquiry but also embrace risks to expand the boundaries of knowledge in their respective fields.
Muhamad Abdelmageed
Cairo University
Cultural Studies
Coming from an English Studies background, my specialization in the hermeneutics of critical and literary theory compelled me to commit myself critically to decolonial theories. The glaring ethnocentrism of theory and the unfortunate compartmentalization of the human sciences have led theory to neglect the pre-1500 intellectual legacy of the Arabic–Islamic civilization. It is not expected that theory wrestles with Arabic–Islamic logic, kalām, or uṣūl al-dīn, yet the contribution of this civilization is inseparable from these epistemic kernels. A new historiography of past global networks of knowledge is in need of decolonial theories to transcend the largely textual philosophies of theory and its lack of commitment to inclusivity. As an assistant lecturer and a Ph.D. candidate at Cairo University in the pre-1500 dialectics, my commitment to decolonizing the past is one of the ways forward towards actualizing this much-needed inclusivity.
Rachel Al Rubai
University of Toronto
Religion
My fascination with global history and religion was first truly sparked by a high school trip. I grew up in a small, rural community in Alberta and my family and I had saved up for a high school culinary trip to Italy. Coming from a place where escalators were a luxury, I was absolutely blown away by Florence. I came to Toronto for post-secondary and was determined to learn more about peoples, cultures, histories, and languages. However, growth isn’t an end goal for me, it’s a constant process. My research examines the interconnected networks of religious groups, and how their socio-cultural contexts shape and mold the beliefs and practices of individuals within these networks. I am fascinated by investigations of religious space, art, architecture, and ritual and love to explore the embodiment of religion within material culture and theology. My dissertation utilizes the application of network theory to analyse how women participated and influenced late antique Christian asceticism around the Mediterranean in light of limited written source materials. Outside of my research, I am a museum professional and work in collections management, storage, and conservation.
Mutharasu Anbalagan
IIT Bombay
Humanities & Social Sciences
Let me take you on a journey through my life as a budding archaeologist. It all began in the heart of a charming village of Tamil Nadu located in South India, where the landscape was adorned with traces of ancient cultures. Local legends whispered of hidden treasures concealed within enigmatic inscriptions and towering megaliths, sparking my fascination for archaeology. And as I embarked on my academic journey, I ventured into the realm of history during my undergraduate studies, and later delved into the world of archaeology at the postgraduate level. With each step, my enchantment with the art, architecture, and technologies of ancient civilizations deepened. The thrill of unravelling history through exploration and excavation felt like piecing together an enthralling puzzle, drawing me further into this captivating field. My passion eventually found a niche in the realm of microliths — those diminutive stone tools that held stories of their own. This path led me to my current pursuit: a Ph.D. dedicated to unravelling the mysteries of the origin and evolution of microlithic technology in South India. Today, as an enthusiastic archaeologist, I continue to journey across the globe, exploring the diverse cultures of our world, each new exploration expanding my knowledge and igniting my curiosity further.
Rakesh Das
IIT Bombay
Humanities & Social Sciences
My academic journey has been profoundly shaped by my unwavering fascination with Archaeology and Indological studies, particularly in the realms of South Asian temple architecture, iconography, ethnography, and ancient Indian history. I landed upon archaeology in particular while I was doing journalism. During the reporting days, I was assigned to do special feature stories on Odisha’s archaeological temple and monuments — for which I had to visit and collect information. In this process, I encountered many curious aspects of temple history and archaeology. Exploring the subtle meanings of architectural patterns and iconographic images emboldened me to study this subject further. More importantly, I currently focus on the local or regional socio-cultural influences on the classical temples, which has been a central aspect of my academic inquiries.
Himanshu
IIT Bombay
Humanities & Social Sciences
Growing up in Haryana, until I encountered the obscure and shrill forces of something that has gone but is still being invoked to drive the now, everything around just randomly. The folk tales, literature on various late 20th-century religious movements and contemporary social stirs fuelled by them were where I recognised the dance of premodernity. Its golden age was not always alluring since, gradually, it forced me to evaluate the values, identity, the way of being given to me, and even my own and my ‘others’ existence. The peak of enchantment was an encounter with thoughts of Ancient and classical philosophies (majorly Sanskrit) as discipline; it was full of mystery, rigorous arguments, injunctions, and stories, but it was also shocking to experience that almost nothing from the so strong foundations of Sanskrit philosophy itself was engaging with the sites where I first encountered it — culture. This apparent absence of philosophically critiquing its own sociality and cultural grounds, especially in the academic study of Sanskrit philosophy, further became a significant preoccupation in my research in philosophy. However, I also see that 10-11th CE philosopher Abhinavagupta and his ‘Philosophy of Recognition,’ with which I am currently working in the initial year of my Ph.D., may render absence of this absence and provide some significant tools to theorise South Asian sociality.
Sowmya Karunanithee
IIT Bombay
Humanities & Social Sciences
I have been enamoured by different humanities and social sciences domains since I was young. However, sociology came to occupy a special place in my heart. I fell in love at first sight when I opened the book The Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context by Lewis A. Coser. My love for sociology has persisted from then on. I am inquisitive about anything concerning humans, their ideas and society. I like to observe humans in group behaviours and record them academically or creatively. I am currently pursuing my Doctorate in Philosophy in Sociology from IIT Bombay. My current research focuses on the imaginaries of Eris and Eri Poramboke lands in North Chennai. In this context, I have spent time in the field trying to understand the changing imaginaries of the Eris and practices around it from the past to current times. While my research does not focus solely on the past, it forms a significant crux. In disciplines like sociology, not many are interested in the past, but I believe that in this research on Eris, looking beyond the Eurocentric approach to accommodate the local Tamil imaginaries of the past does provide interesting insights. As part of the Global Past Initiative, I am interested in networking with scholars attempting to look beyond hegemonic understandings to alternative understandings of the past and, thus, subsequently, the present.
Yating Liao
University of Toronto
Anthropology
I have long been interested in cultural diversity rooted in local social dynamics that involved long-distance interaction across Eurasia from a non-Western perspective. I have a multidisciplinary academic background in Chinese, history, and archaeology and working experience with Russian and Japanese scholars about the movements of goods, people, ideas, technologies, and subsistence strategies in Early Eurasia. In my MPhil project completed in Hong Kong, I systematically present the circular jades in Hong Kong before 500 BC and discuss the two manufacturing systems in the production process: working by freehand and working with a manufacturing device, elucidating local innovation and cultural developments. By addressing these topics, the project contributes to the discussions on early circular jade production in Hong Kong through raw material selection, technology choices, technological continuity, and transformations in prehistoric Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta. This research enhances the visibility of a then “marginal” region in terms of the Shang political structure. It demonstrates that the local developments in Hong Kong were essential and comprehensive on their own and in their connection and unique contributions to those of other regional societies in East and Southeast Asia. My Ph.D. project will mainly focus on the Eurasian steppes from the late third until the late second millennium BC and try reconstructing the network of prehistoric cultural links in this vast area. I choose the Proto-Silk Road — the Hexi Corridor and Tao River Valley in North-western China on a critical location in this network — as a case study, where we possess relatively limited information before it became a part of the Han Dynasty and a crucial section of the Silk Road. I will take the jade production organization and transmission network of raw materials and technologies to fill the research gap, thus reflecting the local social dynamics and urbanism development, human-environment interactions, and long-distance communications along the Proto-Silk Road.
Yumna Moussa
American University in Cairo
Arabic Studies
I found my way to a career in the history of Islamic art and architecture by wandering through the alleyways of Historic Cairo. Seeing hieroglyphs carved on the walls of a mosque that was simultaneously supported by Roman columns stirred up in me a profound curiosity towards the eccentricities of medieval Islamic history. The spoken legends surrounding the seemingly anachronistic elements experienced by the locals in their daily exchanges at mosques, shrines, and madrasas intrigued me even further. Such continuous relationships between material culture and present-day life in Islamic cities like Cairo taught me a lot about what it means for heritage to be living. This led me to work with several local organizations that advocate for more community engagement in conservation projects of Islamic material culture. It has also inspired my academic research which explores the biographies of patterns in Islamic contexts and the cultural semiotics of Islamic commercial space.
Harikrishnan N.
IIT Bombay
Humanities & Social Sciences
My research interests emerge from what I consider to be my residual identity amidst the transient situations that dotted my lived experiences. Dare I say that my encounters with the past, histories, and the makings of such were part of my everyday life, even before my breaking into academia. My upbringing in cosmopolitan environs populated by government employees, not only made the colours of India’s diversity brighter, but also offered a closer look at different cultural layers that premeditate a sense of relatability within social interactions amidst the diversity. In fact, I could even refer to my very late introduction to Tamil literacy — my native tongue — at the upper primary level as my first foray into research. I do not know what is more uncanny about the experience — a trilingual kid effectively reducing his illiteracy to one language or acquiring literacy in my own native tongue as a virtual outsider. Although, I do lean heavily towards the mysteries of structures and strictures, simultaneously enabling and unabling certain modes of thought, as uncannier here. While the consciousness of an ancient past emerged through the endeavour, it bore no service or resemblance to the post-colonial, governmental (and other so adjectivized) modernities. Yet the existence of such a past is implausible to realize without entanglement into modern modalities that sustain unconsciously. This unfamiliarity of the familiar is a sensibility that constantly guides my doctoral research on Tinai. Subsequently, I wish to carry this sensibility into other areas such as a labour history of wet nursing in caste societies, modern materiality from a technocentric perspective, the vernacularization of political consciousness, science, and technology in 20th and 21st century India.
Sarah Awni Nasr
American University in Cairo
Arabic Studies
Growing up in Cairo I have been surrounded with countless splendid heritage, but I was not intrigued until my very first field trip where I went inside one of the buildings and had this experiential moment with it. My passion for Islamic art and architecture started then and the link between heritage and the community became my interest. A lot of historical sites are endangered and need conservation. Therefore, we must assure that our heritage — whether it be tangible or intangible — is safeguarded and transmitted from one generation to the other. This will not happen unless there is a change in the mindset while conserving to a more appropriate reuse strategy, and city management. I believe that the community is the protagonist of change, and even if it is hard to achieve this aspired adjustment nowadays with the immense challenges the world is facing, it is our duty to educate the youth about their heritage as they will be the protectors of it one day. People need to be exposed to their history to guarantee a preserved identity. I aspire to create a full album sketched about historic Cairo showing the architecture, arts, and crafts of the different dynasties and how they enriched our culture using and integrating my scientific and artistic backgrounds. This requires collaborative efforts between interdisciplinary approaches, and I look forward to sharing this with the Global Past’s diverse collection of participants.
Eman Aly Selim
Ain Shams University
Archaeology
I am a Greek papyrologist and conservator who hails from Egypt, the homeland of Archaeology. My initial fascination with the papyri sprang from my Greek studies at the Faculty of Arts, where I obtained my master’s degree in editing Greek papyri and Ostraca. While editing an unpublished Greek papyrus text, my professor discovered that, although the letters are readable, they are not functional to produce readable words, demonstrating that the papyrus sheet is incorrectly conserved. At this point, I became curious about the conservation process and realized how crucial it is to comprehend the papyrus construction as an ancient writing material. This inspired me to enroll in the master’s program in the conservation of Antique Photographs and Ancient Paper Heritage, and as time went on, I grew increasingly fascinated with the papyrus plant’s potential to produce one of the oldest and most durable writing materials. I currently work as a specialist conservator at the Ain Shams University-Faculty of Archaeology, with a particular emphasis on manuscripts and papyri. Furthermore, I began my doctoral dissertation in Green Conservation and Digital Preservation for Papyri Collections, as I believe that studying this priceless material from a digital perspective will be essential for its preservation process in the future and ensuring the sustainability of our heritage.
Amarjeet Singh
IIT Bombay
Humanities & Social Sciences
My interest in this project is motivated by the combination of an investment in sources from the past and a concern for present predicaments. Broadly, I am interested in exploring how premodern being and thought in the Indian subcontinent — specifically, in the Urdu, Persian and Punjabi poetic and philosophical traditions — can help us navigate the contemporary landscape of technological modernity. The problematic here, as I understand it, is two-pronged: a flattening of being and thought through an ontological-hermeneutical collapse of premodern structures of meaningfulness, especially in the Global South; and a simultaneous material-existential collapse in the form of the climate crisis. Having an academic background in philosophy has compelled me to focus on attempting to understand how premodern thought can engage with the former against the material background of the latter. The hope is that this attempt could help us better navigate the landscape of technological modernity. Through this workshop, I seek to explore possibilities of such models of approaching the premodern that can serve as alternatives to discourses which structurally re-produce ersatz mimeses of modern structures of thought and modern ways of thinking.
Kai Wang
University of Toronto
Art History
Originally from China, I am currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program in art history at the University of Toronto. I completed my bachelor’s and initial master’s degrees in art history in China before pursuing my second master’s degree at the University of Toronto. During my time in China, I was involved in research projects such as the Getty-funded “Global Medieval Art” program, and I also embarked on an academic trip to Central Asia to explore premodern Islamic art and Buddhist caves. These experiences broadened my perspective and enabled me to connect Chinese medieval art with different visual traditions. With over a decade of dedicated study in the field, my current research primarily focuses on premodern Chinese painting. However, I also maintain a broad interest in art history spanning various eras and regions, including medieval Islamic art and Byzantine art. Additionally, I hope to study premodern Chinese art from a global perspective.