Research interests

My research interests focus on Islamic manuscripts and visual culture in the Ottoman Empire and South Asia from from the 16th to the 19th century. I work on manuscripts and lithographs in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman, and Urdu. 

Broadly speaking, I research and publish on following topics: 

Islamic codicology and art history, curating and museology

The history of art and manuscript collections from the Islamic world and South Asia in European and North American repositories; in particular, the Delhi Collection and its trajectory from the pre-1857 Muslim intellectual milieu of Delhi to the India Office Library.  

Continuity and rupture in Islamic knowledge production in the transition from manuscript production to print and lithography, with particular reference to South Asia and genres of knowledge such as divination, talisman-making, pictorial falnamas, cosmology and bibliomancy.

Ottoman devotional manuscript practices, including the pictorial programme in the Enam-i Serif and Dala'il al-Khayrat manuscript corpus. 

I am also working on the space of the shrine in South Asia and its relationship to visuality in the occult sciences and print culture. 

My PhD was on the social history of slavery in early modern Istanbul, and I continue to research and publish on this topic. 

External impact and engagement

 o    From 2015-2021, I was the Lead Curator for the South Asia collections at the British Library, a role which involved oversight of the entirety of the collection of printed books (roughly half a million volumes), periodicals, newspapers and manuscripts (which number 20,000 items) in South Asian languages and supervising a team of curatorial experts, each of whom have responsibility for a linguistic subset of the collection.   In addition to having administrative oversight of the South Asia collections, I was also responsible for the curating the sub-collection of Islamic South Asia, consisting of manuscripts and printed books in Indic languages written in Perso-Arabic script, primarily Urdu.  In this role, together with the Head of the Asia and Africa department, in 2015 I applied for a large grant from Newton-Babha fund, administered by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK, to lead a research and digitisation project to make the British Library’s collection of early printed South Asian books available on-line. Called the ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’ project, as our aim was to research and digitise the earliest printed book in India, dating to 1713, and all other South Asian printed material up to 1914 held in our collections.  The BL’s collections hold unique South Asian printed material not found in repositories elsewhere, which should be made available to a global audience, rather than just to those who are able to come physically to the library. This initial grant, as well as further grants from the UK’s BEIS ministry, for a total £1.2 million, allowed me to hire a team of linguistic and technical experts to create a large project to digitise our early printed collections from South Asia for an initial two-year phase.  We received a further grant of £500,000 in 2018 that allowed us to extend the project into 2020, for a total of £1.7 million in funding for a four-year project employing between 6-8 team members, to create a digital humanities resource for the early printed South Asian collections in the BL.   One of the main aims of the digital humanities research strand of the project was to develop Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for Bengali script through a series of international contests; the team were successful in developing Bengali OCR to an accuracy rate of over 90%, and won a staff achievement award in 2018 for our accomplishment.  The team crafted further outputs for the digital humanities research strand of the project and generated a series of data visualizations generated from the metadata of the scanned items, mapping the location of printers in Calcutta and prices of the digitised books and other information pertinent to the social and cultural history of printing in 19th-century India.  In addition, the project team created a programme of skill-sharing and capacity-building workshops in digital humanities research methods, metadata standards, and digitisation workflows for partner institutions in India.  We created a very active calendar of academic events in the UK and India over four years, featuring workshops, research fellowships, conferences, and seminars on the history of manuscripts, printing and lithography in South Asia, which generated a podcast series that has reached thousands of listeners.  In addition to our academic work, we also have built a programme of community outreach events to engage South Asian diaspora communities in London whose cultural heritage may intersect with the collections. The Two Centuries of Indian Print project in its initial phase also achieved one of our primary goals, which was to create an on-line resource with examples of the collection items that we have digitised, featuring contextual articles on the history and significance of the items, information about the digital humanities outputs of the project, such as advances in OCR and data visualization, as well as updates on our academic events and podcast series. We made over 1,400 individual collection items available on-line with full cataloguing metadata, and are hard at work creating on-line catalogue records for a further 4,000 which have been digitised and are awaiting ingest into the on-line viewer. Our research activities continue, with planned scholarly publications from our last series of workshops in 2018, ‘Islam and Print in South Asia,’ co-organised with my colleagues on the project who are the curators and research specialists, and the special edition of conference proceedings was published in a double issue special edition of the Journal of Islam in Asia: entitled Islam and Print in South Asia, IJIA, Vol 2, Issue 1-2 (September, 2023) co-edited by Nur Sobers-Khan, Priyanka Basu and Layli Uddin.

Biography

 Nur Sobers-Khan is a researcher and curator of Islamic manuscripts, art and archival collections. She served as director of the Aga Khan Documentation Center (2021-22), a research centre and archive dedicated to the study of visual culture, architecture and urbanism in Muslim societies. From 2015-2021, she was the Lead Curator for South Asian Collections at the British Library, London, where she was head of the South Asia section and responsible for curating the South Asian printed books and manuscript collections and also led a team of specialist curators. During this time, she was Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded research and digitisation project Two Centuries of Indian Print (2016-2021), and her research emerging from this project pivots around two questions: the role of the dispersal and removal of cultural heritage artefacts from South Asia under British colonialism as a contributing factor in shaping Islamic intellectual life in the second half of the 19th century, and the transition from manuscript to print in the same period and the circulation of lithographed texts on cosmology, dream interpretation and other divinatory literatures. She previously served as the Iran Heritage Fellowship Persian Manuscript Curator at the British Library (2012-13) and was Curator for Turkey and the Ottoman Empire at the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha (2014-15).  Book-length publications include a monograph based on her PhD research, entitled Slaves Without Shackles: Forced Labour and Manumission in the Galata Court Registers, 1560–1572, published by Klaus Schwarz Verlag in 2014 (now by De Gruyter), a co-authored exhibition catalogue Qajar Women: Images of Women in 19th-century Iran (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2016), and co-edited double issue special edition of the International Journal of Islam in Asia, entitled Islam and Print (Vol 3, Issue 1-2, Sept 2023). Her reviews and articles have appeared in Oriens, Journal of Early Modern History, Critical Muslim, and Global Intellectual History and various edited volumes. She completed her graduate and undergraduate studies at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Cambridge, with a PhD in Islamic History in 2012 and an undergraduate degree in Oriental Studies in 2006 (BA Hons MA), with a focus on Arabic and Persian philology and the literature and history of the Middle East.