Karen C. Pinto

Raised in Karachi, Pakistan, of South Asian, 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 the three decades hunting down maps in Oriental manuscript collections around the world. She has a 3000-strong image repository of Islamic maps—many that have never been published before. Her book Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration was published by The University of Chicago Press in November 2016 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 “What is 'Islamic' about Islamicate Maps” and “The Mediterranean in the Islamic Cartographic Imagination.” Along with her work on Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, she is interested in Digital Humanities, Spatial Studies, and developing 3D.