Beate Fricke (Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley) and Barry Flood (Professor, New York University) have been awarded an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship for 2016-17. The program provides support to small teams of two or more scholars to collaborate intensively on a single, substantive project. In Object Histories—Flotsam as Early Globalism, Beate Fricke and Barry Flood draw from case studies in the medieval European and Islamic worlds to tackle methodological and theoretical issues of writing histories of flotsam, when the only source one has is a unique surviving artifact, image, or monument divorced from other documentation of its contexts. Information about the ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship; read more about Professors Flood and Fricke's project.

Sugata Ray has been awarded the Historians of Islamic Art Association's 2014-15 Margaret Ševčenko Prize for his essay Shangri La: The Archive-Museum and the Spatial Topologies of Islamic Art History. The Ševčenko Prize, awarded annually for the best essay written on any aspect of Islamic visual culture, is named in memory of Margaret Bentley Ševčenko, the first and long-serving Managing Editor of Muqarnas, a journal devoted to the visual culture of the Islamic world and sponsored by the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard and at MIT. Ray's essay on the twentieth-century display of Islamic art in the United States was researched during his 2013 tenure as Scholar-in-Residence at the Shangri La, Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, Honolulu.