My main interests centre on the production of luxury and semi-luxury goods in the Ottoman Empire, and the social and economic contexts of their consumption. My focus is mostly on the years between 1600 and 1800, and on objects made for market and specifically on those intended for use in the home.
I am a historian of Islamic art, trained at the Khalili Research Centre for the Art and Material Culture of the Middle East—part of the Oriental Institute at Oxford; my previous appointment was at the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin, where I worked on the plans for the 2019 re-installation of the permanent collection.
My research focuses primarily on the consumption of luxury goods in the Ottoman Empire and on Islamic visual and material culture, widely conceived. In 2012, I gave public lectures in Berlin, Lyon, and Washington, DC and in Honolulu, where I was a scholar-in-residence at Doris Duke’s Shangri La estate. My essay about the social and economic context of silk textiles in the Ottoman Empire won the 2012 Margaret B. Ševčenko prize in Islamic Art and Culture, awarded by the Historians of Islamic Art Association.