ABOUT

Fatima is a doctoral candidate in the School of Arts, Humanities and Technology at UT Dallas and her dissertation focuses on the visual and material culture of medieval Sindh under the Arab Islamic rule from the 8^th to the 10^th century CE. Through a close study of the surviving Sindhi artifacts her research explores the diverse artistic influences – Islamic, Persian and Indic – and the trade and cultural networks that shaped Sindh – a multicultural and multireligious space forming the eastern frontiers of the expanding Islamic world of the time. A significant contribution of this study will be the creation of a digital catalog documenting artifacts, many of which remain unpublished and scattered across provincial museums in Pakistan. She hopes that the resulting cohesive database of artifacts will contribute to the narratives of Islamic art history and culture by bringing to the forefront Islamic art and material culture of understudied regions and time periods. Ultimately, she hopes to situate early medieval Sindh as a site of artistic and cultural confluence within the global discourse on Islamic art history. Her scholarly interests also include the medieval Mediterranean world and the Fatimids in whose footsteps she has traveled to Tunisia (the medieval Maghreb) and Egypt.