Name: 2026 Mikhail Lecture with Art Historian, Christiane Gruber
Start: 2026-03-12T18:00:00-04:00
Location: The Center for the Visual Arts

2026 Mikhail Lecture with Art Historian, Christiane Gruber

TOPIC | "Images of the Virgin Mary in Islamic Lands"
Jewish and Christian prophets have been central to Islamic thought and devotion since the emergence of Islam in the 600s. Among them, the Virgin Mary holds a prominent place as the mother of Jesus as well as a prophetess in her own right, to whom an entire chapter in the Qur’an (Surat Maryam) is dedicated. Visual depictions of Mary can be found in Islamic lands within mosaics, metalwares, manuscripts, and paintings, the latter of which accelerated in Iran during the fourteenth century.
Thereafter, and most especially during the seventeenth century in South Asia, the arrival of Jesuit missionaries catalyzed Christian-Muslim religious interactions while European printed images yielded new and highly creative depictions of Mary included in Mughal manuscripts and albums. In these malleable pre-modern Muslim spheres of production and practice, Mary emerges as the quintessential holy female symbol in her positions as mother, matriarch, intercessor, and healer.
Admission & Visitor Parking - Free
Use area #3 next to the Center for the Visual Arts.
About Our Speaker, Dr. Christiane Gruber
Dr. Gruber is Mehmet Ağa-Oğlu Collegiate Professor of Islamic Art History in the History of Art Department at the University of Michigan. Among others, her areas of expertise includes Islamic figural representation, devotional paintings of the Prophet Muhammad, and Islamic ascension texts and images, about which she has written three books and edited several volumes of articles.
She also pursues research in Islamic book arts, codicology, and paleography, having authored the online catalogue of Islamic calligraphies in the Library of Congress as well as edited the volume of articles entitled The Islamic Manuscript Tradition. Her third field of specialization is modern and contemporary Islamic visual and material culture, about which she has edited several volumes and written over a dozen articles.