Holley Ledbetter

Holley Ledbetter is a PhD candidate in premodern Islamic art and architecture. Her primary field of research is art and architecture of the caliphal period (c. 650-1250), with a particular focus on representations of enslaved populations, mechanical devices, and the intersections of race and gender in the Fatimid world. She also pursues research on censorship within Islamic contexts as well as cultural exchange between the Islamic world and the Vikings, where she contributed to The Seas and the Mobility of Islamic Art (Yale University Press, 2021) with her essay entitled "Exchange and Alteration: The Viking Afterlives of Samanid Silver." Holley's research has been supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship, a Freer Gallery/National Museum of Asian Art fellowship, and the University of Michigan. Her most recent publication, “Aestheticizing Enslavement: Representations of Jawārī in Fatimid Visual Culture” will appear this summer in a special issue of Convivium focused on the arts of medieval Northern Africa. Holley is currently a visiting professor of Islamic art at Oberlin College.