Sylvia Wu is a historian of medieval and early modern Islamic art. She specializes in the architecture and material culture of the Indian Ocean world, with a focus on Muslim communities in coastal China and their multifaceted engagement with the region’s other Muslim societies. Her primary research interests include mosque and shrine architecture; pilgrimage and the idea of sacred geography; and the intersections of narrative building with material and spatial presentation.
She is currently developing her first book project, which examines the capacious idea of mosque construction—as imitation, recreation, and a form of history (re)writing—in the medieval Chinese port city of Quanzhou. Framed within an oceanic context, this project explores how the coastal mosques, in particular Masjid al-Ashab, the only surviving mosque site in the city, were established and reimagined in the thickness of medieval globalism. The study offers, at the same time, a thorough account of the Quanzhou mosque sites as part of the local religious landscape and, by identifying their connections with other coastal mosques in the maritime milieu, an opportunity to look beyond canonical mosque paradigms. She is also at work on several article-length projects that investigate the consumption and nuanced receptions of the Arab-Islamic visual language in twentieth and twenty-first-century China. They shed light on the use of classical Islamic forms in the contemporary era while addressing themes of urbanism, heritage preservation, and social engineering.
Wu received her PhD from the University of Chicago. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts among other fellowships and grants. Her publications have appeared in the International Journal of Islamic Architecture and postmedieval. She has also contributed to Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online and other public-facing, open-access platforms.