Karen Pinto

Raised in Karachi, Pakistan, of Indian, Russian, French, and 16th-century Goan-Portuguese stock, educated at Dartmouth and Columbia, Karen Pinto specializes in the history of Islamic cartography and its intersections between Ottoman, European, and other worldly cartographic traditions. She has spent three decades examining maps in manuscript collections around the world. She has a 2000-strong image repository of Islamic maps—many that have never been published before. Her book Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration was published in November 2016 by University of Chicago Press and won a 2017 OAT (Outstanding Academic Title) award from Choice. She has won numerous grants for her work on Islamic maps, including a 2013-14 NEH fellowship. She has published articles on medieval Islamic, medieval European and Ottoman maps and has on-going book projects on “The Maghrib & the Mediterranean in the Islamic Cartographic Imagination” and “What is ‘Islamic’ about Islamicate Maps.” Along with work on Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Pinto works with Digital Humanities, Spatial Studies, and is trying to develop 3D spatial modules of places on Islamic Maps. See a display of her work and dot stories on https://pixeum.org/featured-exhibits Presently she is an Independent Associate Scholar in Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. For examples of Karen Pinto’s work see: https://colorado.academia.edu/KarenPinto