JOACHIM GIERLICHS, Ph.D., is an independent scholar, curator, and consultant in exhibition and museum planning, currently working as curatorial and collections consultant at the Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi, UAE. During the academic year 2018-2019 he was senior research fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt College for Islamic Intellectual History at the University of Bonn, Germany.  From September 2013 to October 2016 he was director of special collections and archives at the Qatar National Library in Doha. Prior to that he was curator at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha (2007–2010), guest curator and scientific adviser of the “Roads of Arabia” exhibition at the Pergamon Museum, Berlin (2012), and research associate at the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin for the Yousef Jameel Digitization Project. His research focuses on the art and material culture of Anatolia, Iran and Central Asia in medieval and early modern times, and most recently also on the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf region in the pre-modern and modern period. He is the author of many articles on various topics and the author and co-editor of several books, including “Islamic Art in Germany” (Mainz, 2004), “Crimea, Caucasus, and the Volga-Ural Region: Islamic Art and Architecture in the European Periphery” (Wiesbaden, 2009), “Focus 50: Unseen Treasures from the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar” (Doha, 2010) and “Roads of Arabia: Archaeological Treasures from Saudi Arabia” (Tübingen, 2012).