The University of Texas at Austin

Faculty Member, Art and Art History

Assistant Professor

Fine Arts

About

Stephennie Mulder (M.A., Princeton University, 2001 - Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2008) is Assistant Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin.  A specialist in architectural history and archaeology, she has worked for over ten years as the ceramicist for Princeton University’s excavations at the Islamic site of Balis, Syria, and is preparing a two-volume study of medieval Islamic ceramics based on her work there.  A second project, _The Shrines of the 'Alids in Medieval Syria: Sunnis, Shi’is and the Architecture of Coexistence_, is under contract with Edinburgh University Press.  The book identifies, draws, and maps dozens of previously unstudied ‘Alid shrines and argues for their role in medieval sectarian conciliation and accommodation. 

Dr. Mulder’s publications include “The Mausoleum of the Imam al-Shafi’i,” Muqarnas 23 (2006); “Jar Stoppers, Seals, and Lids” in S.E. Sidebotham - W.Z. Wendrich (eds.), Berenike 1999-2000 (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, 2006); and “Alternative ‘Alids: How the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II Transformed the Ordinary in the Cemetery of Bāb al-Saghīr in Damascus,” in Zulfikar Hirji and Ruba Kana'an (eds.), Places for Worship and Devotion in Muslim Societies (London: Berghahn Books, in press); a review of Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair, _Rivers of Paradise: Water in Islamic Art and Culture_ (in press, Journal of the American Oriental Society).  Currently in progress or in press: "Seeing the Light: Enacting the Divine at Three Medieval Syrian Shrines", to be published in a volume commemorating Renata Holod, (forthcoming 2013); "Mosques under the Ayyubids" and "Shrines in the Central Islamic Lands" in the Cambridge History of World Religious Architecture;  "A Survey and Typology of Islamic Molded Ware (Ninth-Thirteenth Centuries) based on the Discovery of a Potter’s Workshop at Medieval Balis, Syria" (in progress).

She is the recipient of a College Research Fellowship from the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, University of Texas at Austin; the John D. Murchison Fellowship in Fine Arts from the College of Fine Arts, The University of Texas at Austin; the George A. Barton Fellowship, Albright Institute for Archaeological Research, Jerusalem, Israel; and the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship. Her article "The Mausoleum of the Imam al-Shafi'i" received Honorable Mention for the Margaret B. Sevcenko Prize from the Historians of Islamic Art Association. 

In 2009, Dr. Mulder won the Department of Art and Art History Teaching Excellence Award. 

Dr. Mulder is editor for the H-ISLAMART listserve, the listserve of the Historians of Islamic Art Association (HIAA).  If you would like to join the listserve, please send an email to Dr. Mulder at smulder@mail.utexas.edu.  For further information about HIAA and to become a member of our growing international organization, please see http://www.historiansofislamicart.org/