Isabella is a doctoral candidate in History of Art supervised by Dr Yashawini Chandra and Dr Glaire Anderson. Her research explores the social and political significance of Mughal encampments during the seventeenth century and beyond. The Mughals were highly mobile, developing the peripatetic traditions of their Central Asian ancestors to conquer and rule large swathes of South Asia. Encampments could be home to thousands of individuals for multiple years, enabling military and political expeditions, while acting as centres of administration and governance. Studies by academics such as Ebba Koch, Stephan Blake, and Chanchal Dadlani have shown that architecture can provide researchers with great insight into the society and politics of the Mughal empire. By examining the design, structure and use of tents, Isabella’s work will re-situate them within the canon of Mughal architecture and shed new light on the social significance of mobility during this time.

Despite their significance and abundance in Early Modern South Asia, tentage is often overlooked in discussions of Mughal architecture. This is, in part, a result of the fragmented nature of most Mughal tents, which have been cut up and dispersed across global museum collections. Isabella’s work, therefore, will include the creation of digital visualisations to demonstrate how many of the tents she is studying may have once appeared. These visualisations will be used alongside the original tent hangings and first-hand accounts of Mughal encampments to help her understand how they were originally used and understood.

Isabella has an undergraduate MA in Fine Art from the University of Edinburgh. During this time, she studied Sculpture and History of Art, developing her practice as a digital sculptor as well as an interest in pre-modern Islamic Art History. Isabella also received her Masters degree from the University of Edinburgh, where she specialised in Global Premodern Art. As part of her Masters, Isabella completed her first internship with the Digital Lab for Islamic Visual Cultures and Collections, an organisation whose goal is to make information about the premodern Islamic world more accessible through video games. Isabella has since completed a second internship with the lab, where she helped in the development of a video game set in Umayyad Cordoba.

Awards and Scholarships:

• The Luigi and Laura Dallapiccola Foundation 2025 Travel Grant
• Karun Thakar Fund Scholarship Award 2025