Professor Karen Pinto has spent three decades at the forefront of the study of Islamic cartographic history. Her first book, Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration, came out in 2016, and she is currently working on a second, focusing on Islamic maps of the Mediterranean. Today, she is an Associate Scholar in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

"When I was a graduate student at Columbia in 1991, my professor, the late but incredibly great Olivia Remie Constable (1961-2014), suggested that I write a seminar paper on the medieval Muslim geographers. That sent me to the dark recessed of the Islamic history and geography collection on the 11th floor of the Butler Library. There I, literally, tripped over Konrad Miller’s late 1920’s extensive 6 volume: Mappae Arabicae: Arabische Welt und Länderkarten des 9–13. Jahrunderts. (6 vols. Stuttgart, 1926–1931) black and white reprints of hundreds of medieval Islamic maps hidden in Oriental manuscripts hitherto little known in the western history of cartography world.

Miller’s dusty, crumbling black-and-white reprints of medieval Islamic maps of the Mediterranean, formed the basis of my first major work on the subject: “Ṣūrat Baḥr al-Rūm: The Mediterranean in the Medieval Muslim Cartographical Imagination,” my MA Essay at Columbia U that went on to win SSRC’s 1992 Ibn Khaldun Prize. That experience led, in turn, to a life-long obsession and hunt for maps scattered in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscript libraries worldwide that resulted in her first book on Islamic maps of the world in “Medieval Islamic Maps: An Introduction” (Chicago, 2016) and a collection of some three thousand images of maps, many not reprinted.