Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Cultures of the Islamic World is sponsored by the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Muqarnas 32, subtitled “Gazing Otherwise: Modalities of Seeing In and Beyond the Lands of Islam” and guest edited by Olga Bush and Avinoam Shalem, is the outcome of a two-day conference (“Gazing Otherwise: Modalities of Seeing”) held at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence in October 2012. Along with introductions by each of the guest editors, the volume contains ten articles that examine the gaze and the aesthetic experience of the beholder as they are constructed, depicted, and theorized within the culture-specific frameworks pertinent to the field of Islamic studies, through approaches developed in the fields of art history, visual culture, and anthropology.

Authors include Samer Akkach, Olga Bush, Holly Edwards, Emine Fetvacı, Laura U. Marks, Gülru Necipoğlu, D. Fairchild Ruggles, Matthew D. Saba, Avinoam Shalem, and Eva-Maria Troelenberg.