Contact
Primary Phone: (717) 253-4598
ABOUT
Born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, educated at Dartmouth and Columbia, Karen Pinto is into pre-modern maps of all kinds and sizes in a big way. When maps become mimetic she looses interest. She specializes in medieval Islamic maps and has spent the better part of two decades hunting them down in manuscript libraries around the world. She has a 2000-strong image repository of maps—many that have never been published before. Her book, Ways of Seeing Islamic Maps, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. She received a 2013-14 NEH fellowship to work on her next book on "The Mediterranean in the Islamic Imagination," and she has plans for books on "The Far West in the Islamic Cartographic Imagination," "Islamo-Christian Cartographic Connections," and "Place in the Context of Time and Place." She has also been working on an online digital encyclopedia of Islamic Maps (MIME), which pending funding for the copyright and use of the images, she hopes to release to the public some day soon. In addition she has written shorter articles on Mehmet II and his patronage of Islamic maps, Islamic Cartographic Connections with the Piri Reis Map, and possibly the earliest extant Islamic map from the 8th century (article forthcoming in Imago Mundi). She is blessed with an adorable daughter, Safiye.
Discipline
History
Sub Areas
13th-18th Centuries
7th-13th Centuries
Historiography
Islamic Studies
Medieval
Mediterranean Studies
Middle East/Near East Studies
Turkish Studies
Geographic Areas of Interest
All Middle East
Islamic World
Mediterranean Countries
Specialties
Hist Of Cartography
Islamic Cartography
Islamic Hist
Languages
Arabic (advanced)
French (elementary)
German (elementary)
Persian (intermediate)
Russian (elementary)
Spanish (advanced)
Turkish (advanced)
Urdu (advanced)
Education
PhD
| 2002
| History
| Columbia University
MPhil
| 1993
| Hist
| Columbia U
Abstracts
Medieval Islamic Maps: Understanding the geopolitics underlying the KMMS vision of the Mediterranean
Through the Directionality of Pilgrimage and Prayer: Ways of Seeing Mecca, Medina, and Other Sacred Places
