The conference Arts and Crafts in the Late Ottoman Empire aims to advance art historical and interdisciplinary research on practices and concepts of material culture in Ottoman lands between the 18^th and the early 20^th centuries. While inviting contributions on all geographies of the Empire, our call for papers foregrounds late Ottoman Syria as a case through which to expand the analytical and historical horizons of Islamic art and architecture studies and to contribute to broader debates in Ottoman and Arab historiographies of modernity. We encourage authors to consider the analytical frameworks—temporalities, epistemes, and materialities—that underpin the conference’s critical inquiry into the entangled modernities of Ottoman arts and crafts.

May 22-23, 2026, Lebanese American University (Beirut, Lebanon)

Convenors

May Farhat and Sarah Sabban

Argument

New Orientations in Islamic Art and Architecture History

Long excluded from the foundational narratives of Islamic art and architecture history, the period from the 18^th till the early 20^th centuries has attracted growing scholarly attention since the turn of the 21^st century (Flood and Necipoğlu 2017; Behrens-Abouseif and Vernoit 2006; Deguilhem and Faroqhi 2005; Vernoit 1997). New interdisciplinary research shaped by the material turn in the humanities and by critical reflections on the Eurocentric framing of modernity—has challenged earlier assumptions that Islamic artistic and architectural practices declined after the 17^th century (Graves forthcoming; Trevathan 2025; Rosser-Owen 2020; Hamadeh and Kafescioğlu 2021; Flood 2019, Phillips 2016). Equally, scholars have demonstrated the vitality, adaptability, and creativity of late Ottoman visual and material worlds, revealing their entanglements with global flows of goods, ideas, and technologies, as well as their embeddedness in local practices, knowledge systems, and social lives (Lanzillo 2024; Graves and Seggerman 2022; Volait 2021; Avcıoğlu and Flood 2009). Despite this momentum, Syria (Bilād al-Shām) received far less sustained attention than other Ottoman and Islamic lands such as Anatolia/Turkey, Egypt, or Iran, and has only recently started to gain traction (see Milwright 2018; Abou-Hodeib 2017; Auji 2016; Sheehi 2016; Scharrahs 2013; Weber 2009; Establet and Pascual 2005; and Kalter, Pavaloi, and Zerrnickel 1992).

Building on this new scholarship, the Arts and Crafts conference aims to advance art historical and interdisciplinary research on practices and concepts of material culture in Ottoman lands between the 18^th and the early 20^th centuries. While inviting contributions on all geographies of the Empire, our call for papers foregrounds late Ottoman Syria as a case through which to expand the analytical and historical horizons of Islamic art and architecture studies and to contribute to broader debates in Ottoman and Arab historiographies of modernity. 

Entangled Modernities: Materialities, Epistemes, and Temporalities

Following the methodological program of entangled histories, our endeavor is not limited to chronologically expanding the scope of study but strives for a deeper reflexive commitment to rethink the relationship between material culture, knowledge, and modernity as an integral part of the history of the Islamic world. We propose to employ “entangled modernities” as a critical site of inquiry into materialities, epistemes, and temporalities at play in the configuration of arts and crafts in the late Ottoman Empire. Integral to this approach is the premise of polyvalent and malleable thinking that can transcend rigid boundaries, undo dichotomies, and illuminate processes of cross-fertilization.

• Temporalities

The timespan covered by the conference aligns with a strategic decision to step back and, we hope, productively reframe the usual terms of periodization and pregiven contours of modernity and pre-modernity that preset the objects of study and their coordinates in time. We thereby encourage serious attention to indigenous temporalities embodied or performed in objects, concepts, and material processes that reveal new matrices of continuities, ruptures, and revivals. Indeed, the period under consideration witnessed the gradual integration of the Empire into the global economy and the implementation of a series of reforms, culminating in the Tanzimat period (1839-1876), which signaled profound changes that the state and society had to contend with. These developments raise the question of plural and contested temporalities, which gains further importance in light of increasingly unequal terms of exchange and interaction that characterized Ottoman relations with a fast-industrializing and expansionist Europe.

• Epistemes

Our approach emphasizes the mutually constitutive nature of cross-cultural encounters (often between parties of unequal power) and, to the extent possible, contextualizes their components and outcomes in a processual, holistic, and heuristic manner. It equally entails the necessity to historicize categories of knowledge, partly by focusing on webs of meaning formed between emic and etic notions that organized the material world, transformed it, and were transformed by it. The many languages spoken across the Empire fostered unique environments where the modern Western order of knowledge was refracted in many directions and made to reflect local and regional histories. Translation between languages and epistemes undoubtedly depended on emergent, experimental, and contingent forms of knowledge that can instruct the modern historian on the changing conditions and materialities within which they existed.

• Materialities

The staggering effects of the Industrial Revolution on the material world and people’s engagement with it cannot be overstated, but they were not all-encompassing, simultaneous, or uniform. Hence, the central aim of this conference on arts and crafts is to reconsider all aspects that constituted, (re)shaped, and represented material culture across this period of more than 200 years including conditions, modes, and tools of production; regional and global circulations of goods and technology transfer; interplay between science, economy, and state; relations between makers, patrons, merchants, and consumers; apprenticeship and other forms of knowledge transmission; skill and artistic traditions between artisanal and mechanical production; modes of valuation, such as taste or aesthetics; how Ottoman economic and legal reforms as well as international agreements negotiated between global pressure and internal stakes.

Overall, we encourage authors to consider the analytical frameworks—temporalities, epistemes, and materialities—that underpin the conference’s critical inquiry into the entangled modernities of Ottoman arts and crafts, in Syria and beyond. We welcome contributions engaging with any of the themes discussed in this call, or those that innovatively expound on them, including but not limited to interdisciplinary research, object-centered studies, case-based micro-histories of concepts, people, and institutions, as well as historiographical questions on sources, archives, conservation discourses, and digital humanities initiatives dealing with material culture. 

Submission Guidelines

We invite abstracts of up to 300 words, along with a short biography (max. 100 words), to be sent to MAIA.events@lau.edu.lb by January 15, 2026. Papers may be delivered in English or Arabic.

Decisions will be communicated by February 1, 2026.

Selected papers from the conference will be considered for publication in an edited volume or a special issue of a journal.

Selected Bibliography

Abou-Hodeib, Toufoul. A Taste for Home: The Modern Middle Class in Ottoman Beirut. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017.

Auji, Hala. Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut. Leiden: Brill, 2016.

Avcıoğlu, Nebahat and Finbarr Barry Flood, eds. “Globalizing Cultures: Art and Mobility in the Eighteenth Century.” Special Issue, Ars Orientalis 39 (2009).

Behrens-Abouseif, Doris and Stephen Vernoit, eds. Islamic Art in the 19th Century: Tradition, Innovation, Eclecticism. Leiden: Brill, 2006.

Deguilhem, Randi and Suraiya Faroqhi, eds. Crafts and Craftsmen of the Middle East: Fashioning the Individual in the Muslim Mediterranean. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005.

Establet, Colette, and Jean-Paul Pascual. Des tissus et des hommes. Beyrouth: Presses de l’Ifpo, 2005.

Flood, Finbarr Barry. Technologies de dévotion dans les arts de l'Islam: Pèlerins, reliques et copies. Paris: Hazan / Musée du Louvre, 2019.

Flood, Finbarr Barry, and Gülru Necipoğlu, eds. A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture. 2 vols. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2017.

Graves, Margaret S. Invisible Hands: Fabrication, Forgery, and the Art of Islamic Ceramics. Princeton University Press, forthcoming.

Graves, Margaret S. and Alex Dika Seggerman, eds. Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2022.

Hamadeh, Shirine and Çiğdem Kafescioğlu, eds. A Companion to Early Modern Istanbul. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2021.

Kalter, Johannes, Margareta Pavaloi, and Maria Zerrnickel, eds. The Arts and Crafts of Syria: Collection Antoine Touma and Linden-Museum Stuttgart. London: Thames and Hudson, 1992.

Lanzillo, Amanda. Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India. University of California Press, 2024.

Milwright, Marcus. The Arts and Crafts of Syria and Egypt from the Ayyubids to World War I: Collected Essays. Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2018.

Phillips, Amanda. Everyday Luxuries. Art and Objects in Ottoman Constantinople, 1600-1800. Dortmund: Verlag Kettler, 2016.

Rosser-Owen, Mariam, ed. “Middle East Craft.” Special Issue, The Journal of Modern Craft 13, no. 1 (2020).

Scharrahs, Anke. Damascene ῾Ajami Rooms: Forgotten Jewels of Interior Design. London: Archetype, 2013.

Sheehi, Stephen. The Arab Imago: A Social History of Portrait Photography, 1860-1910. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.

Trevathan, Idries, ed. In Praise of the Artisan: The Enduring Legacy of Islamic Crafts. Medina Publishing Ltd, 2025.

Vernoit, Stephen. Occidentalism: Islamic Art in the 19th Century. London: Nour Foundation, 1997.

Volait, Mercedes. Antique Dealing and Creative Reuse in Cairo and Damascus 1850–1890: Intercultural Engagements with Architecture and Craft in the Age of Travel and Reform. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2021.

Weber, Stefan. Damascus: Ottoman Modernity and Urban Transformation 1808-1918. 2 vols. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2009.