About

Christiane Gruber is the Mehmet Ağa-Oğlu Collegiate Professor of Islamic Art History in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her scholarly work explores medieval to contemporary Islamic art, with expertise in Islamic book arts, paintings of the Prophet Muhammad, and Islamic ascension texts and images. She has authored three books and edited several volumes of articles on these topics. Her research also includes Islamic book arts, codicology, and paleography, having created the online catalogue of Islamic calligraphies in the Library of Congress and edited the volume titled The Islamic Manuscript Tradition. Additionally, her third area of specialization is modern and contemporary Islamic visual and material culture, about which she has edited multiple volumes and written over a dozen articles. Her recent publications include the book The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images and the edited volume The Image Debate: Figural Representation in Islam and Across the World. Currently, she is working on eco-Islamic art and architecture as well as the visual culture of the Nation of Islam. Gruber’s public-facing essays have appeared in various outlets, and her research has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships. Over the past two decades, she has taught art history at several institutions, including the University of Michigan, Indiana University, Humboldt University, and Sorbonne University. She has served on the board of the Historians of Islamic Art Association, including as President-Elect, and has founded and directed Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online since 2020.

Research topics

• Ancient history
• History
• Philosophy
• Computer Science
• Art
• Archaeology
• Literature
• Law
• Religious studies
• Visual arts
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• Riding the Winds of Change: Khamseen and Islamic Art History Online

  International Journal of Islamic Architecture · 2025-01-01

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• Représenter Muhammad en terres d’Islam

  ˜L'œHistoire. · 2025-10-01

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• The Muslim Metaverse and its Premoderns: Islam in an Expanding Reality

  International Journal of Islamic Architecture · 2025-05-22

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In February 2022, Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs landed in the news when it announced that performing the pilgrimage to Mecca in the Metaverse does not count as a ‘real hajj’. Mixed reactions to this statement notwithstanding, this article argues that, in the Metaverse era, the existence of a visible but immaterial realm is not just avant-garde, post-modern, or, worse, a ‘blameworthy innovation’. Instead, today’s Muslim imaginary worlds draw upon and find echoes in premodern Islamic artworks, objects, and other forms of creative expression. The Metaverse also recalls the so-called ‘realm of similitudes’ ( ‘alam al-mithal ) developed in historical Islamic dream thought, the definitional contours and imagistic boundaries of which vary and enlarge over time. Such changes occur not only in the minds of spiritual sojourners, but also through technological innovations. All of these changes converge today to craft immersive worlds that reaffirm a historical past, play with forms in the present, and project poetic visions of what might come next.

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• The Tree as an 'Animal-esque Plant' ( Nabat Hayawani ): Arboreal Thoughtscapes in Islamic Lands

  CrossCurrents · 2024-09-01

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  Abstract: Over the centuries, trees have held a prominent place in the greater Middle East, in both Muslim and non-Muslim spheres. Not only did they inspire the scriptural landscape of the Qur'an, whose cosmic trees stretch from hell to heaven, but they also provided an arboreal pivot for prophecy within Muhammad's sacred mosque complex located in the palm city of Medina. In Morocco, Iran, Turkey, and elsewhere, trees also have fulfilled manifold duties, both real and symbolic, for various Muslim and non-Muslim communities such as Sufis, the Amazigh (Berbers), Shi'is, and Yezidis. In these non-Sunni majoritarian milieus, trees, tree-saints, and tree-shrines function as centers of sacrality, shade-providers, pillars of saintliness, homeopathic healers, carriers of the life blood of their communities, and ribboned relics of individuals whose lives—and natural environments—are increasingly endangered today. Trees and humans thus conjoin in a "natural Sunna way," in which a deep reservoir of historical thought, practice, and creative expression can serve as points of reference and inspiration to help support and sustain a multitude of life-forms in the future.

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• Islamic paintings of the Prophet Muhammad are an important piece of history – here’s why art historians teach them

  2023-01-09

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• The Prophet Muhammad’s Sandalprint: Muslim Retro-cool and the Product-placed Sermon in Contemporary Turkey

  2023-01-01 · 1 citations

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• 7 From ISIS to the AfD: Ultraist Rhetoric and Visuality in Alt-Orientalist Concurrence

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2023-11-17

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• In Conversation with Christiane Gruber on Material Islamic Studies

  MAVCOR Journal · 2022-01-01

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• Like Hearts of Birds: Ottoman Avian Microarchitecture in the Eighteenth Century

  Journal18 · 2021 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Ancient history
  • History

  Christiane Gruber Mosque and grove, ancient wall and garden, palace and courtyard, are full of song, of the cheerful sound of twittering and chirping; everywhere there is the rush of wings, everywhere the busy, active little lives go on.

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• The Masonic Muhammad

  Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2021-01-01

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Frequent coauthors

• Avinoam Shalem

  Columbia University

  5 shared

• Frederick S. Colby

  1 shared

• Pierre Lory

  1 shared

• Sune Haugbølle

  Roskilde University

  1 shared

• Francesca Leoni

  1 shared

• Kambiz GhaneaBassiri

  1 shared

• Mohammad Ali Amir‐Moezzi

  École Pratique des Hautes Études

  1 shared

• Pamela Karimi

  Cornell University

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship
• Max-Planck Foundation Fellowship
• Mellon Foundation Fellowship
• Council on Library and Information Resources Fellowship
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship