Kristen Pearson (September 2025-June 2026)
The Hajji Baba Club is pleased to announce that Kristen Pearson has been awarded the 2025–2026 Hajji Baba Club Research Fellowship from an exceptional group of applicants.
Kristen Pearson is an advanced PhD candidate in Anthropology and Inner Asian Studies at Harvard University. Her research explores how contemporary Kazakh pastoralists in Western Mongolia engage with felt carpets, known as syrmaq, as living treasuries of tradition, identity, and evolving social relationships.
The fellowship supports Pearson’s ongoing dissertation research as well as outreach initiatives in collaboration with Mongolian heritage institutions. She previously led the Endangered Material Knowledge Programme project Nomadic Material Heritage, documenting craft techniques in Kazakh and Uriankhai communities. Pearson also served as Textile Archaeology Fellow for a U.S. Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural Preservation project from 2022–2024.
The Hajji Baba Club Research Fellowship was established in 2018 to promote original scholarship in the field of carpet studies. It provides financial support and visibility for emerging scholars and independent researchers.
Sarah Molina (September 2023-June 2024)
The Poetics of Space: How Carpets Shaped the Safavid World
Sarah Molina is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the history of art and architecture at Harvard University. Her dissertation explores how Safavid carpets mediated experiences of space in the early modern Islamic world. This study involves not only reconstituting the architectural contexts of these carpets but also examining how such objects actively produced new spaces. Molina has held various positions and fellowships at museums, including the Harvard Art Museums, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Margaret Squires (September 2022-June 2023)
Crafting Splendour: Safavid Carpets in Architectural Context
Margaret Squires is the May Beattie Visiting Fellow in Carpet Studies at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. The Hajji Baba Club Research Fellowship supported her PhD research at The Courtauld Institute of Art, which considered carpets from Iran’s Safavid period (1501–1722) as site-specific works of art in the context of palaces, gardens, and shrines. Her first monograph, The Safavid Carpet in Architectural Context, is based on this project and will be published in 2027 with Edinburgh University Press.
Dr. Fatima Kadić (September 2019-June 2020)
The Traditional Prayer Rug as an Artistic Expression of the Islamic Cosmological Symbols
Dr. Kadić works as head librarian at the library of the Faculty of Islamic Studies, University of Sarajevo. She obtained two bachelor’s degrees from the University of Sarajevo, one in Islamic studies and the second in Persian and Turkish languages and literature. Her PhD, supervised by Professor Walter B. Denny, was on the Islamic Prayer rug and its cosmological iconography.