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Nur Sobers-Khan
British Library
Occupation
Curator
Contact
ABOUT
Nur Sobers-Khan completed a BA in Oriental Studies (Arabic and Persian) in 2006 and a PhD in Islamic History in 2012 at the Oriental Studies Faculty at the University Cambridge. In 2012-2013, Dr. Sobers-Khan was the Iran Heritage Curator for Persian manuscripts at the British Library, and in 2014-2015, she was a curator at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, where she curated the exhibition, 'Building Our Collection: Mughal and Safavid Albums' and co-curated, 'Qajar Women: Images of Women in 19th-century Iran'. She is currently the Lead Curator for South Asia at the British Library, responsible for the South Asian language books and manuscripts in Perso-Arabic script. She is currently the Principle Investigator of the AHRC/Newton-Babha-funded Two Centuries of Indian Print research and digitisation project that aims to create a digitised corpus the BL’s early printed South Asian book collections. She is the author of the monograph Slaves Without Shackles: Forced Labour and Manumission in the Galata Court Registers, 1560–1572 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2014), and co-author, with Mounia Chekhab-Abudaya, of Qajar Women: Images of Women in 19th-century Iran (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2016). Her book reviews and articles have appeared in Oriens, Journal of Early Modern History, New Middle Eastern Studies, Critical Muslim, Renaissance Quarterly and Global Intellectual History. She has lectured topics in Islamic studies and history at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge (2011-12), the Faculty of Theology, Religion, and Philosophy at St. Mary’s University College (2010-2012), and the Department of Comparative Liberal Studies at Habib University (2019).
Discipline
History
Sub Areas
13th-18th Centuries
Arabic
Islamic Law
Mughal Studies
Ottoman Studies
Iranian Studies
Geographic Areas of Interest
All Middle East
India
Iran
Specialties
Islamic Codicology
Education
PhD | 2012 | Oriental Studies | Cambridge
Abstracts
‘Innovation, commentary and translation: Scientific and religious knowledge between the Ottoman and Mughal Empires (16th-18th centuries)’ The Mass Production of the Cosmos: Concentric Diagrammes from Manuscript to Lithograph