Congratulations to ISAW Students Nour Ammari and Lylaah Bhalerao

Nour Ammari was awarded the Clement F. Bailey Award from the Numismatic Literary Guild for The Islamic Collection At The American Numismatic Society. 

Nour specializes in late antique and early Islamic visual culture in the Southern Levant (5th–10th centuries CE). Her dissertation examines inscribed portable objects from present-day Northern Jordan during the transitional period surrounding the centralization of the first Islamic state, using these artifacts to explore cultural syncretism and the relationship between script, language, and identity in multifaith communitiesduring a period of porous yet developing confessional boundaries. More broadly, her research engages questions of text and materiality, the quotidian record, and the critical interrogation of the historiographical categories of "Byzantine" and "Islamic" themselves.

Lylaah Bhalerao was recognized as an honorable mention for the Barbara McManus Award for Outstanding Scholarship for her work entitled, "Black Feminisms in Roman Archaeology? Approaches Beyond Critical Fabulation, from Pompeii to Hadrian’s Wall".

Lylaah's work commits to a critical, intercultural study of antiquity from the Mediterranean to South Asia and Africa. Her current research explores blackness in antiquity employing methodologies from Black Studies and Postcolonial Studies, including black and Asiatic feminisms and theories on race. She is also interested in cultural exchange, transmission of knowledge, and movement of people (and beasts) between the Mediterranean, Africa and India in the late first millennium BCE-early first millennium CE. More generally, she studies the material culture of, broadly defined, the Greco-Roman world—stretching east through central Asia to India, south to north Africa, and west to the Punic world and Roman Britain—and has begun to develop an interest in the relationship between classical Sanskrit literature and Greek and Latin texts.