she/her
İkbal is a PhD Candidate in History of Art and Architecture. She specializes in early modern Iranian and Indian manuscript painting, and her research interests include art theory, afterlives of artworks, and early modern concepts of the image in the Persianate world and Europe. Her dissertation investigates discourses around the legitimacy of the art of painting in Iran and India roughly between 1540-1640. She tackles these discourses in their widest resonances—from the question of Islamic iconoclasm, to orchestrations of the emperor’s body as an object of devotion, to the poetic metaphor of the idol for the beloved, and its pictorial representations. İkbal’s research reveals hitherto underestimated interconnections between early modern Iranian and Indian artistic discourses and those of contemporary Europe through a shared Byzantine theoretical accumulation.