About the 2019-2021 Co-Chairs

Radha Dalal is Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture and Interim Director of Art History at VCUarts Qatar. She researches visual cultures of mobility and urbanism with a particular emphasis on the Ottoman Empire and its socio-political interactions with other European and Asian polities during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Her research projects have received funding from the MacArthur Foundation, the Kress Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Qatar National Research Fund, and VCUarts Qatar. She continues to work on a VCU Presidential Research Quest Fund supported monograph project titled The Khilafat Movement and Print Media in British India and Ottoman Turkey, 1919–1924. Currently, she serves as the vice-president (2021–2023) of the Society for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, a geographically and disciplinarily diverse network of scholars who share an interest in the world’s connectedness between 1780 and 1914.

Jochen Sokoly is Associate Professor of Art History of the Islamic World at VCUarts Qatar where he also served as Gallery Director between 2004–2011. He has curated exhibitions on contemporary art of the Middle East and lectures on the art of the Islamic World. He has been a research fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Royal Ontario Museum and the Aga Khan Program at Harvard. Sokoly’s research focuses on the culture of the Early Islamic caliphates, in particular on inscribed textiles within the context of court, administration and manufacture. He is co-editor with Mary McWilliams of Social Fabrics: Inscribed Textiles from Medieval Egyptian Tombs published by Harvard Art Museums. He has also worked on 18th century British India, particularly the botanical paintings by the Indian painter Zayn al-Din from the collection of Sanskrit scholar Sir William Jones at the Royal Asiatic Society, and plans a study of the drawings of travelers Thomas and William Daniell. Sokoly serves on the Council of the Royal Asiatic Society in London.

Sean Roberts is a Lecturer in Early Modern Art at the University of Tennessee and Affiliated Associate Professor at VCUarts Qatar. His research is concerned with the interactions between Italy and the Islamic lands, the cultural history of maps, and with the place of prints in the histories of art and technology. He is the author of Printing a Mediterranean World: Florence, Constantinople and the Renaissance of Geography (Harvard University Press, 2013) and is the co-editor of Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Truman State University Press, 2013) and The Seas and the Mobility of Islamic Art (Yale University Press, 2021). His essays have appeared in numerous journals including Imago Mundi, Print Quarterly, Renaissance Studies, and the Journal of Early Modern History. He has been awarded research fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), the Huntington Library, and Villa I Tatti. From 2017 to 2019, Roberts served as President of the Italian Art Society, an international non-profit organization dedicated to the study of Italian art and architecture from pre-history to the present day.