Born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, of Indian, Russian, and French stock, educated at Dartmouth and Columbia, Associate Research Professor, Karen Pinto is into maps of all kinds and sizes in a big way. She specializes in the history of Islamic cartography and its intersections between Ottoman, European, and other worldly cartographic traditions and has spent the better part of two decades hunting down maps in Oriental manuscript libraries around the world. She has a 2000-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 including a 2013-14 NEH fellowship for her work on Islamic maps of the Mediterranean. She has published articles on medieval Islamic and Ottoman maps and is working on books on “Islamo-Christian Cartographic Connections” and the “Mediterranean in the Islamic Cartographic Imagination.”

Along with her work on Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, she is interested in Digital Humanities and Spatial Studies and encourages students and scholars to contact her if they are interested in these subjects.

For more information on her work please refer to: https://boisestate.academia.edu/KarenPinto

email: karenpinto@boisestate.edu