Islam and the Visual World With Carel Bertram

Over the centuries Muslim artists, architects, calligraphers, illuminators, and illustrators have given visual form to religious history, intellectual ideas, imperial goals, and human aspirations. Using both visual and literary sources, this class is an introduction to their aesthetic imagination. In part one we explore Qur’ans, religious history manuscripts, and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem as visualizations of the transcendent in Islam. In part two we focus on the imperial city of Istanbul as a visualization of Ottoman Turkish urban ideals in an Islamic context.

Carel Bertram is an Associate Professor in the Humanities Department at San Francisco State University, focusing on the richness and diversity of Islamic culture. She received her MA in Near Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley and her PhD in Art and Architectural History at UCLA. Her book, Imagining the Turkish House: Collective Visions of Home, was published by the University of Texas Press. Her current research interest is Armenians of the Anatolian Diaspora who pilgrimage to memory-places of their Ottoman pasts.