Fatima Quraishi specializes in the arts and material culture of the Islamic world, with a particular interest in the visual culture of Muslim communities in South Asia. Her research examines the intersection of transregional artistic styles with locally embedded practices and considers the role played by religion and religious communities in shaping artistic production. Her current book manuscript, Palimpsests Past and Present: The Sufis and Sultans of the Makli Necropolis (1380–1660) is an interdisciplinary study of a vast funerary site in the Indus Deltaic plain. Unravelling the layered history of the necropolis, the project demonstrates the vibrant lives and afterlives of funerary sites in South Asia and their entanglements with the surrounding landscape, both built and natural, and the communities that reside there.

Building on her interests in landscapes and practices of memorialization, she has begun work on a new project on mapping practices in Kashmir during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Focusing on a group of monumental maps of the Kashmir Valley painted on cotton and embroidered shawls depicting the city of Srinagar, this research investigates how artisans integrated their practices with geographic knowledge, literary texts, and territorial transformations to produce deeply local understandings of place. 

Previously, Quraishi curated the exhibition, “Paradise on Earth: Manuscripts, Miniatures, and Mendicants from Kashmir,” at the Mohatta Palace Museum in Karachi in 2017. She also held teaching positions at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture and at the Shaheed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology, both in Karachi, Pakistan. 

Education

Areas of Specialization

Islamic Art and Architecture, Indo-Islamic Architecture, Devotional Practices and Material Culture, Transregional and Transcultural Histories, Historiography of Islamic Architecture in South Asia.

Selected Publications

“Islamic Architecture of Sindh,” In Routledge Handbook of Sindh Studies, edited by Michel Boivin and Matthew Cook. Routledge, forthcoming. 

“Contact and Continuity: The Arts of Sindh,” In The Oxford Handbook of the Mughal World, edited by Richard M. Eaton and Ramya Sreenivasan. Oxford University Press, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190222642.013.36 

“Sultanate art and architecture, an introduction.” In SmartHistory, May 20, 2022, https://smarthistory.org/sultanate-art-architecture-introduction/

“Luminescent Lotuses: Mimesis in Miḥrābs and Microarchitecture at Maklī.” In “Sindh: Towards the Philology of a Place,” edited by Manan Ahmed Asif. Special issue, Philological Encounters 7, no. 1-2 (2022): 55-94.

“Multan Art & Architecture.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, Three, edited by Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson, 126-131. Brill, 2021.

“This is Makkah for Me! Devotion in Architecture at the Makli Necropolis.” In Saintly Spheres & Islamic Landscapes: Emplacements of Spiritual Power across Time and Place, edited by Daphna Ephrat, Ethel Sara Wolper, and Paulo G. Pinto, 270-300. Brill, 2020.

“Elements of the Mosque: Form and Adornment,” co-written with Matthew D. Saba. In Mosques: Splendors of Islam, edited by Jai Imbrey, 22-41. Rizzoli, 2017.

“Asar-ul-Sanadid: a nineteenth-century history of Delhi.” Journal of Art Historiography 6 (2012). http://arthistoriography.wordpress.com/