This lecture will take place online at 17:00 BST

When historical texts are read, readers rely on their intellectual conditioning to understand and judge what such texts are conveying. In this experimental talk, Dr Shahzad Bashir utilises 19th-century Indian Islamic texts to suggest that anamorphism highlighted in concept-driven photography provides a useful analogy for seeing how historians’ narratives become containers for irreducibly complex worlds. Historians’ claims about the past are always equally valid and distortive, mirroring the way a two-dimensional image in a photograph captures a three-dimensional world. The analogy helps scholars appreciate historical knowledge as a particular form of truth that cannot be mapped to basic notions of objectivity, subjectivity, normativity, and so on. 

Resister to attend in person: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/the-institute-of-ismaili-studies/t-qjopnae

Register to attend online: https://iis-ac-uk.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_KQU7DjuMR-6V1SbEirIVrg#/registration