
Field of Study:
Islamic Art History
Home Institution in the U.S.:
University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA
Host Institution in Uzbekistan:
Andijan State University, Andijan region
Start Month/Year in Uzbekistan:
October 2024
Duration of Grant:
Ten months
Bermet Nishanova
Bermet Nishanova is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of California Irvine. Her research project concerns medieval textiles from Iran, India, and Central Asia between the ninth and mid-thirteenth centuries, and her main research questions relate to historical textile materials and the processes of their production, use, and repair. Additionally, she is interested in incorporating textiles into broader scholarly considerations of the medieval Islamic material world. Her work specifically engages with recent scholarship on intermediality, where textiles are seen as influencing and shaping how other materials and artworks are made and perceived.
Bermet’s Fulbright project is exploring the integration of Islamic textiles from Central Asia between the ninth and mid-thirteenth centuries into the larger material dialogue of Islamic artworks. Specifically, her dissertation suggests that far from having strict material categories (such as textiles, architecture, metalwork, etc.), different materials were enmeshed together, creating complex, intermedial, and materially entangled spaces. Her argument regarding the intermedial nature of Islamic arts in Central Asia is based on the interdisciplinary frameworks developed in anthropology and archaeology by Ian Hodder (2012), Bruno Latour (2007), and Ben Jervis (2018).