Alya Karame specialises in Islamic art and material culture. She is the recipient of the Paris Region award and is currently based at the Collège de France where she is writing her first monograph on a forgotten corpus of medieval Qur’ans. Prior to that, she was a fellow of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Arts at Harvard University and held a research associate position at the Orient-Institut in Beirut from which she is on leave. In 2019, she was the Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral fellow at the American University of Beirut where she had also taught and in 2018 she received the Barakat Trust Postdoctoral fellowship at the Khalili Research Centre of the University of Oxford. She joined the Kunsthistorisches Institut research program in Florence Connecting Art Histories in the Museum supported by the Max-Planck Institut and was based at the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin between 2017 and 2019. Her research has been supported by numerous grants including the Arab Funds for Arts and Culture and the Historians of Islamic Art Association. She obtained her PhD in 2018 in Islamic Art History from the University of Edinburgh and her MA in History of Art & Archaeology from the School of Oriental and African Studies.

As a member of CallFront, Alya Karame will be focusing on scripts in medieval eastern Iran. She will particularly examine the relationship of Qur’anic scripts to other arts, such as architectural epigraphy which will inform about tactics adopted for crossing and referencing other media.