The Department of Asian and Islamic Art History, University of Bonn, congratulates Jahfar Shareef Pokkanali on his outstanding achievement and award.
The Award Ceremony and Lecture will take place on Wednesday, 15th April 2026, from 6:00–7:30 p.m. Central European Time (CET) via Zoom.
In October 2025, Dr. Jahfar Shareef Pokkanali finished his doctoral studies in the Department of Asian and Islamic Art History with his dissertation entitled “Entangled Interdependencies and Littoral Singularities: Mosque Architecture in Malabar and the Lakshadweep Islands in the Age of Colonial Globalisms in the Indian Ocean”. Now he was awarded the UC Berkeley South Asia Art & Architecture Dissertation Prize.
During his research period he was an associate at the “Embodied Dependencies” cluster at the Bonn Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies. The Barakat Trust in Oxford and a doctoral scholarship from the Bonn International Graduate School of Oriental and Asian Studies supported his research. Pokkanali attended “The Seas and Mobility of Islamic Art” as a fellow. He is a board member of the European Association for Asian Art and Archaeology.
In their commendation, the 2026 prize committee writes:
“Jahfar Pokkanali’s deep investigation of what he calls the ‘translittorality’ of Islamic architecture in Malabar and Lakshadweep brings to our attention sixty-one sites built from the sixteenth century to the present. Delving deeply into different aspects of architectural form, the dissertation does much more than rigorously and carefully document these sites; it also offers a new rubric for thinking about architectural history outside of dynastic labels and with full recognition of the oceanic interconnections among coastal and island regions of the world. The study speaks to emergent discourses that refocus art history on the maritime and oceanic while foregrounding the continual interruptive rhythms of disruption and displacement within those networks. By engaging questions of entanglement, layering, and the transregional, Pokkanali opens up new vocabularies for thinking about the mobile and porous histories of architecture in the Malabar region and beyond.”
The UC Berkeley South Asia Art & Architecture Dissertation Prize will be awarded to an outstanding doctoral dissertation on the art, architecture, or visual cultures of South Asia and its diasporas from any discipline in the arts, humanities, or social sciences.