Dr Dilrabo Tosheva

Steering committee member

Dr Dilrabo Tosheva is an AKPIA Fellow at Harvard University. She is interested in how visual culture was adopted and adapted throughout the Islamic world (particularly in the northeastern frontiers) as influenced by local choices in representation, the accessibility of materials, and the availability of technical skills. Much of her published work has focused on early Islamic funerary monuments, both individual and collective, where she has utilized endowment deeds, other written sources, archaeology, and art historical methods to construct explanatory narratives. These narratives explore the context of patronage, the rationale behind construction, and the social and economic significance of these buildings to local communities. Dr Tosheva earned her PhD in 2022 from the University of Queensland, Australia, with her dissertation titled “Making the Islamic Façade: Transformation in the Funerary Structures of Central Asia in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries.” She also holds a MS in Architecture, from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2017), an MA in History from the Navoi State Pedagogical Institute, Uzbekistan (2012), and a BA in History from the Bukhara State University, Uzbekistan (2000).

Research Interests

Architectural History of Central Asia and Islamic world, cultural anthropology, heritage preservation, Medieval Studies, transformation of the built environments, archaeology of Central Asia

Publications

Tosheva, Dilrabo. Review of “Medieval Monuments of Central Asia: Qarakhanid Architecture of the 11th and 12th Centuries” by Richard Piran McClary. Central Asian Survey 40, no. 2 (2021): 288-90.DOI: 10.1080/02634937.2020.1854969

Tosheva, Dilrabo. “Women in the Architecture of Uzbekistan.” In The Bloomsbury Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture, edited by Lori Brown and Karen Burns, (eds.) 2021. [Invited entry, under peer review].

Tosheva, Dilrabo. “Problems in the Study of Genesis: The Foundations of the Sogdian-centric Claims in the Historiography of the Islamic Architecture of Central Asia.” In O’rta Osiyo Arkheologiyasi Kafedrasi: Avlodlar Izlanishi Va Kashfiyotlari, edited by A. C. Sagdullayev, 194-201. Tashkent: NUU, 2020.

Contact

dilrabotosheva@fas.harvard.edu