Notes on Contributors
Samer Akkach
FAHA, is Professor of Architectural History and Theory and Founding Director of the Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture (CAMEA) at the University of Adelaide. His main areas of expertise are in the fields of Islamic art and architecture, Islamic mysticism (Sufism), and Islamic intellectual history, and his interdisciplinary research interests extend to socio-urban and cultural history of the Levant and history of Islamic science in the early modern period. He has held several Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery grants and was a recipient of the ARC Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award (DORA). He is the author of Cosmology and Architecture in Premodern Islam (SUNY, 2005); Islam and the Enlightenment (Oneworld, 2007); Letters of a Sufi Scholar (Brill, 2010); Intimate Invocations (Brill, 2012), Damascene Diaries: (Nissan, 2015); Istanbul Observatory (ACRPS, 2017); and the editor of ʿIlm: Science, Religion and Art in Islam (UAP, 2019), and Naẓar: Vision, Belief, and Perception in Islamic Cultures (Brill, 2022).
James Bennett
is Emeritus Curator of Southeast Asian Art and Material Culture at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory and an Adjunct Research Associate, Faculty of Arts and Society, Charles Darwin University, Darwin. As well as curating major exhibitions of Indonesian art with accompanying catalogues over the past twenty years, James is the co-editor, contributor, and translator for the recent Interwoven Journeys: the Michael Abbott Collections of Asian Art (Art Gallery of South Australia, 2023). He is currently an adjunct curator at the West Nusa Tenggara State Museum in Mataram, Indonesia, as well as invited Guest Expert for the Al-Madar Gallery in the Diriyah Islamic Arts Biennale 2025, Saudi Arabia.
Veronica della Dora
is Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her research interests and publications span historical and cultural geography, the history of cartography and Byzantine studies with a specific focus on landscape, sacred space and the geographical imagination. Her monographs include Imagining Mount Athos (University of Virginia Press, 2011), Landscape, Nature and the Sacred in Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Mountain (Reaktion, 2016), The Mantle of the Earth (University of Chicago Press, 2021), and Where Light in Darkness Lies (Reaktion, 2022).
Alasdair Forbes
Born in London, Alasdair Forbes graduated with an honours history degree from McGill University, in Montreal, before completing an MA in the history of art at the Courtauld Institute. He has worked in Paris and Vancouver, and lived for short periods in India and Italy. Before moving to Devon, he lived and taught in London. For the last 30 years he has been preoccupied with creating and looking after his garden. He has written a book on the garden, On Psyche’s Lawn: The Gardens at Plaz Metaxu (2020), and currently gives a course with Dr Yue Zhuang on ‘Gardens as places of meaning’ at the University of Exeter.
Virginia Hooker
AM, FAHA, is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University where she was formerly Professor of Indonesian and Malay and is now a fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, College of Asia and the Pacific. Her work for international editorial boards includes serving as an Associate Editor for Brill’s pioneering Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures (EWIC). Her current research concerns modern and contemporary art in Indonesia. Among her recent publications are ‘When Laws Are Not Enough’, in Gary Bell (ed.), Pluralism, Transnationalism and Culture in Asian Law (ISEAS Publishing, 2017), ‘“By the Pen!”’, in Samer Akkach (ed.), ʿIlm: Science, Religion and Art in Islam (University of Adelaide Press, 2019), and ‘Seeing with the “Eyes of the Heart”’, in Samer Akkach (ed.), Naẓar: Vision, Belief and Perception (Brill, 2021). With Elly Kent and Caroline Turner she has edited and contributed to the volume Living Art: Indonesian Artists Engage Politics, Society and History (ANU Press, 2022).
Philip Jones
has been a curator in the South Australian Museum’s Department of Anthropology since the 1980s. He has curated more than 30 exhibitions, ranging from Aboriginal material culture and art to the history of anthropology and natural science, expeditions, and frontier photography. His publications include Ochre and Rust (Wakefield Press, 2007), Behind the Doors (Wakefield Press, 2014), and Illustrating the Antipodes, 1844–1845 (National Library of Australia Publishing, 2021). During 2018–2020 he undertook fellowships at Harvard’s Peabody Museum and the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies, researching international networks of ethnographic collectors.
Russell Kelty
is Curator of Asian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, where he has curated and contributed to numerous exhibitions and catalogues. Recently, he curated the exhibition Misty Mountain, Shining Moon: Japanese Landscape Envisioned (2023–2024), and co-edited and contributed to the publication Interwoven Journeys: The Michael Abbott Collections of Asian Art (2023). He has also edited and contributed to the catalogues for major exhibitions such as Pure Form: Japanese Sculptural Ceramics (2021), Samurai (2019), Ever Blossoming: Flowers in Japanese Art (2016), and Treasure Ships: Art in the Age of Spices (2015–2016). He specializes in the art and culture of Japan, with particular emphasis on global trade and the influence of foreign ideas and commodities in painting during the Edo period (1603–1868). He received a BA in Art History from Colorado State University, completed an MA in Art History at the University of Adelaide, with a thesis that examined Vietnamese architectural tiles from the 15th to 16th centuries found in Indonesia. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney researching the depiction of foreign ships in Japan from c. 1639 to c. 1880.
Tracey Lock
has been Curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) since the 2000s. She has been responsible for significant acquisitions and curated eight major exhibitions, including the award-winning Clarice Beckett: The Present Moment (2021) and Dorrit Black: Unseen Forces (2014). Her rehang of AGSA’s permanent Australian art collection (700 works of art) (2018) broke from a linear grand narrative to encompass the transnational and the flexibility of identity. Tracey was a recipient of two prestigious professional awards, The University of Sydney Power Institute Residency Fellowship, Paris (2017), and Churchill Fellow (2012). Her publications include books and journal articles focussing on aspects of 19th- and 20th-century Australian art. She is currently completing her doctoral study at the University of Adelaide, exploring themes of spirituality in 20th-century Australian modern art.
Jeff Malpas
FAHA, is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Tasmania and Honorary Professor at the Latrobe University and the University of Queensland. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and Vice-President of the Australian Association of von Humboldt Fellows, he has published on a wide range of topics, encompassing both Anglo-American and European thought, and often engaging with issues in architecture, art, geography, sociology, and politics. He has edited numerous collections and is the author of many books and essays of which the most recent is In the Brightness of Place (SUNY, 2022).
Muchammadun
is Associate Professor in Community Development Studies at the Department of Islamic Community Development, Mataram State Islamic University, Indonesia. He has been awarded postgraduate degrees from VHL of Wageningen Universiteit and Research Centrum, The Australian National University, and most recently from Yogyakarta State Islamic University, thanks to scholarships from NUFFIC, Australia Awards, and Beasiswa Studi from the Republic of Indonesia. Following his education background and practice, Muh has specialised in community education. His research interests are in community resilience and culture, documentation of tacit knowledge, and education and social transformation. Muh has accordingly been managing academic and NGO-based community work at the Province of West Nusa Tenggara. For an account of this work see: ‘Integration and Interconnection Paradigm in the Field of Social Work Education and Practice’, Ulumuna Journal of Islamic Studies, Volume 24 Number 1, 2020.
Ellen Philpott-Teo
is an architectural and intellectual historian, educator, and craftsperson. She is a current PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide in the School of Architecture and Civil Engineering. Her research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship. Her PhD investigates the connections between aesthetics, religion, science, art, and architecture in Islamic cultures. She has a Master of Architecture in Architectural History and Theory from McGill University and teaches architectural history and theory at the National University of Singapore. In addition to her academic work, Ellen is a poet, weaver, and potter. She has exhibited and sold her work in Singapore and Japan and her upcoming poetic volume The Language of Rivers: A Short History will be published in early 2023 (Office for Poetry Imagined, 2023). Her recent chapter, ‘Transparency: Ibn al-Haytham’s Manāẓir and Visual Perception of Beauty’, was published in Samer Akkach (ed.), Naẓar: Vision, Belief, and Perception in Islamic Cultures (Brill, 2022).
John Powell
is Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Architecture and Civil Engineering at the University of Adelaide, where he completed a PhD in architecture. His primary academic interests lie at the intersection of music, philosophy, and landscape architecture and his recent monograph, Dancing with Time: The Garden as Art (Peter Lang, 2019), investigates this territory. Other publications interrogating these areas include ‘What is Temporal Art?’ (2015) and, with Ismay Barwell, ‘Gardens, Music, and Time’ (2010). His current research project considers composers’ musical accounts of their encounters with and perceptions of natural and designed landscapes, including gardens, and the ways in which those musical accounts are received by listeners.
Rebekah Pryor
is an artist, and an academic at the University of Divinity, Australia. Her work is interdisciplinary and consistently interested in the fields of contemporary art, feminist theory, and philosophy of religion. Her publications include Motherly: Reimagining the Maternal Body in Feminist Theology and Contemporary Art (SCM Press, 2022), Contemporary Feminist Theologies: Power, Authority, Love (edited with Kerrie Handasyde and Cathryn McKinney, Routledge, 2021), and Feminist Theologies: Interstices and Fractures (edited with Stephen Burns, Lexington Books/Fortress Press, 2023).
Wendy M.K. Shaw
has held professorial positions in universities in the United States, Turkey, Switzerland, and Germany. Her work focuses on postcolonial art historiography and decolonial art history of the Islamic world and the modern Middle East. She completed her doctorate at UCLA in 1999. She is author of Possessors and Possessed (University of California Press, 2003), Ottoman Painting (IB Tauris, 2011), and Loving Writing: Techniques of Fact-based Communication at the University and Beyond (Routledge, 2021). Her What is “Islamic” Art? (Cambridge University Press, 2019) has been awarded Honourable Mention for the 2020 Albert Hourani Book Prize of the Middle East Studies Association, and the 2021 Iran Book Award.