researcher · writer · curator of islamic manuscripts and art
Dr. Nur Sobers-Khan is a researcher, writer, and curator of Islamic manuscripts and art, specialising in the material and visual cultures of the Middle East and South Asia.
She has held senior positions at the British Library, the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT, the Museum of Islamic Art Doha, the National Trust, and Birmingham Museums, and holds a PhD in Islamic History from the University of Cambridge.
Introduction · 01
Dr. Nur Sobers-Khan is a researcher, writer, and curator of Islamic manuscripts and art, specialising in the material and visual cultures of the Middle East and South Asia.
She holds a BA (Hons) MA and PhD in Islamic History from the University of Cambridge, where she read Arabic and Persian at Pembroke College. Her doctoral research explored the social history of slavery and manumission in the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire.
She has held senior curatorial and academic positions at the British Library, London; the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT; the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha; the National Trust; and Birmingham Museums Trust. She has also held large-scale consultancy positions advising on Islamic art, archaeology, ethnography, and contemporary art collections internationally, including in the Gulf.
Her research interests span Islamic manuscript traditions, Sufi devotional practices and visual culture, the provenance of South Asian collections in western repositories, and the history of print culture in colonial South Asia.
She is currently Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, and Director and Co-Founder of Regents Art Ltd. She serves on the Editorial Board of Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania's Schoenberg Institute.
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Head of South Asia section. Responsibility for over 20,000 manuscripts and 500,000 printed books in 24 languages. Principal Investigator, Two Centuries of Indian Print (£1.7 million, AHRC/Newton-Bhabha Fund).
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Research in Islamic manuscripts, visual culture, and the material histories of the Middle East and South Asia.
Her research centres on two broad areas: the visual and material culture of Islamic manuscripts and the devotional practices they embody; and the provenance of South Asian collections in western repositories and the decolonial questions these raise. These concerns intersect in her ongoing work on the transition from manuscript to lithograph production in colonial-era South Asia.
She has been a Principal Investigator on a £1.7 million AHRC-funded digitisation and research project, has published in Muqarnas, The London Journal, Brill, and Routledge, and delivers 10–12 invited research talks annually at institutions including Yale, Princeton, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Warburg Institute, and Sabanci University.
The illustrated Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt and Enʿām-i şerīf corpus in South Asia and the Ottoman Empire; visual and haptic devotional practices; the intersection of text, image, and sacred space in late Ottoman and Mughal manuscripts.
Continuities and ruptures in Islamic knowledge production across the transition from manuscript to print culture in 19th-century South Asia. Focus on cosmological, divinatory, and talismanic literatures in Urdu — including the illustrated Tilism-i ʿAjāʾib corpus.
Reconstructing the Islamic intellectual history of pre-1857 Delhi through the manuscripts of the Delhi Collection at the British Library; the role of colonial violence in the formation of South Asian manuscript collections in the UK.
Visual representation of Islamic esotericism in Persian and Ottoman manuscripts; the art history of occult and divinatory texts; Shi'i iconography in illustrated manuscripts including the Falnama corpus.
Curatorial aporia and failure as methodology; the colonial formation of Islamic art as a discipline; restitution debates and decolonial approaches to South Asian and Islamic collections in western museums and libraries.
Principal Investigator on the £1.7m AHRC-funded project digitising 4,000 early printed South Asian books at the British Library (2016–21). Research emerging from the project explores Bengali-script OCR, digital humanities methodologies, and the intellectual history of South Asian print culture.
Advanced. Extensive archival research, manuscript cataloguing, and professional curatorial work. Training in early Arabic scripts and papyri (Biblioteca Alexandrina, 2010).
Advanced. Central to research on Mughal, Safavid, and Indo-Persian manuscript traditions. Reading of literary, legal, and archival texts.
Advanced. Doctoral archival research in the early modern Ottoman Empire using dīvānī, kırık dīvānī, and other scribal hands. Transliterated and translated several hundred 16th-century legal contracts. Traditional calligraphy study in thuluth, naskh, nastaʿlīq, and dīvānī scripts.
Advanced. Central to research on 19th-century lithograph production, South Asian manuscript culture, and the Tilism-i ʿAjāʾib corpus.
Fluent — reading, writing, and speaking. Used in doctoral research on Mamluk-Latin trade documentation.
French: advanced reading knowledge. Latin: intermediate. Ancient Greek: introductory.
Under the tutelage of Adam Gacek and François Déroche.
Dīvānī, kırık dīvānī, and Ottoman scribal hands. As part of doctoral archival research, transliterated and translated several hundred 16th-century legal contracts from Arabic script into English. Simultaneous traditional calligraphy study in thuluth, naskh, nastaʿlīq, and dīvānī.
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Published peer-reviewed book-length catalogue (Silvana Editoriale, 2016).
Miniature paintings and calligraphic compositions from early modern Safavid and Mughal albums.
Research on cosmographic manuscripts; voice for sound element.
Research, objects, and audio guide voice on water shrines in Byzantine and Ottoman Istanbul.
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Available for freelance engagements and collaborations. Past and current clients include Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, the Museum of London, and a range of institutions in the GCC.
Researching Islamic and South Asian art and manuscripts for catalogues, collections research, and evaluations. Deciphering and transcribing inscriptions in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and Urdu. Translations from Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and Urdu. Provenance research and due diligence checks on Islamic art objects and manuscripts. Qualified in art law and collections management (Institute of Art and Law, 2017 & 2023).
Writing and contemporary art collaborations, scholarly publications, catalogue essays, and commissioned writing. Course and workshop design and delivery based on research specialisms: Islamic manuscript studies, decolonial curatorial practice, Islamic art history, dream interpretation and Islamic intellectual history, South Asian cultural heritage. Peer review and editorial board experience (Manuscript Studies, Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, University of Pennsylvania).
Concept studies, feasibility assessments, and operational models for new museums across diverse specialisms, from Islamic art and archaeology to ethnography and contemporary art. Experience advising on institutions in the Gulf, South Asia, and UK — including collections totalling over 100,000 objects.
End-to-end acquisition support including object identification, due diligence, provenance research, ethics compliance, export documentation, and negotiation with dealers and gallerists. Recent projects include the selection and acquisition of 96 Islamic arms and armour objects from 7 countries for a UAE museum (2025–26).
Exhibition development, gallery re-display, interpretation, and collection research for institutions seeking specialist expertise in Islamic art, manuscripts, and South Asian material culture. Experienced in decolonial curatorial frameworks and working with diverse and diaspora communities.
Collections audits, cataloguing to SPECTRUM and TEI standards, digitisation project management, and implementation of collections management systems (including KE EMu, IAMS, Aleph, MARC21/RDA). Principal Investigator experience on large-scale digitisation projects (AHRC-funded Two Centuries of Indian Print, £1.7 million).
Development and oversight of institutional research programmes, exhibition catalogues, and scholarly publications. Commissioning and editing academic contributions. Aligning publication output with curatorial and collections priorities. Extensive experience engaging diverse audiences — from diaspora community groups to international academic conferences.
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Doctoral research on slavery and manumission in the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire, using archival and manuscript sources in Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Latin.
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Five-year digitisation and research project at the British Library. Digitised and catalogued 4,000 early printed South Asian books (1713–1914) in Bengali, Assamese, and Sylheti. Developed Bengali-script OCR achieving 90%+ accuracy (British Library Staff Achievement Award, 2018).
Digitised and made available online previously unpublished hand-written catalogue notes for the Delhi Collection of Persian manuscripts.
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Full details of research languages, professional memberships, services to the field, teaching, and academic awards are available in the complete CV.
Request CV ↗Part 12
Nur was born in Philadelphia in the U.S. to a Guyanese mother and Polish-American father in 1984, and lived in South Carolina for much of her adolescence.
In a Faulknerian turn, she read Oriental Studies at Cambridge University for her undergraduate and graduate studies.
She now resides in London, more or less.
Writing on Islamic manuscripts, art, and cultural heritage.
Papers, conference uploads, and downloadable PDFs of published work.