Lecture | Global Questions Seminar
Translating the Image: Art, Science and Global Imagination in the first Islamic Description of the New World (Tarih-i Hind-i Garbī / History of the West Indies), 16th-20th centuries
- Date
- Tuesday 14 April 2026
- Time
- Serie
- Global Questions Seminar 2025-2026
- Address
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 006
Abstract
This lecture examines a corpus of illustrated and painted books known as the Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi (History of the West Indies), the first non-indigenous and non-European history of the Americas. Manifesting rich layers of multidirectional translation, the work’s journeys, crossings, and circulations in text and image, geographically and temporally—from Spanish and Italian to Ottoman Turkish, Persian and French, from the Americas to Spain, Italy and the Ottoman capital to Iran and India, and more recently to Europe and the U.S., and from manuscript to printed editions leads to a study of early modern travel and colonization from the perspective of the non colonizers, who were acutely curious and interested in knowing about the confines of the earth, and in competing for its domination.
About the speaker
Sinem Casale is an art historian based at the Kunsthistorisches Institut-Max Planck Institut (KHI) in Florence, where she also acts as scientific and academic assistant to Director Gerhard Wolf. She was previously and Associate and Assistant Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of Minnesota, and an Assistant Professor at McGill University's Institute of Islamic Studies. Sinem’s first book, Gifts in the Age of Empire: Ottoman-Safavid Cultural Exchange published by the University of Chicago Press, won the Religion and the Arts award of the American Academy of Religion in 2024. She is also the editor of a recent special issue of the Journal of Early Modern History, on ‘Global Early Modern Art in Seven Objects’. Her next book projects include the Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi manuscripts, which she will discuss in her talk in Leiden, and a comparative project on feasts across the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal realms, titled ‘Spectacles of Consumption: Arts, Ecologies, and Politics of Feasting at Early Modern Muslim Courts’.
Global Questions Seminar
The motto of the Institute for History’s research programme is ‘Global Questions, Local Sources’. Across all areas and time periods, researchers of the Institute focus on important processes such as migration, colonialism, urbanization, and identity formation.
The ‘Global Questions Seminar’, for which we invite distinguished international colleagues to discuss the interplay between global and local issues from the past, brings all staff members of the Institute for History together.
