Christiane Gruber

Christiane Gruber is associate professor and director of graduate studies in the History of Art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research interests span medieval Islamic art to contemporary visual culture and predominantly focus on Islamic book arts, paintings of the Prophet Muhammad, and Islamic ascension texts and images.

She is the author of two books: The Image of the Prophet between Ideal and Ideology (2014), and Visual Culture in the Modern Middle East: Rhetoric of the Image (2013), co-edited with Sune Haugbolle.

Gruber received her bachelor’s degree in art history from Princeton University, and her master’s and doctoral degrees in Islamic art history from the University of Pennsylvania.

In her talk, “The Praiseworthy One: Devotional Images of the Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Traditions,” Gruber explored the ways in which, within a variety of Islamic expressive cultures, artists and viewers alike used pictorial language to express devotion to the Prophet Muhammad.

Gruber’s presentation was sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and served as the keynote program for the Center’s Faculty Book Celebration.

Listen to Gruber discuss the role of art in the Arab Spring Uprising