سم الله الرحمن الرحيم
Bismillah ir-rahman ir-raheem
In the name of God, the most compassionate, the most merciful

i'm interested in...

cats
knitting
medieval textiles
medieval & early modern England
Catholic liturgy
minimal computing
books
the colour green
embroidery
data history
web design
bodies, the senses, & embodiment
equity for BIPOC
the luddite movement
serving Allah سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَىٰ
hobbits
eating Gardetto's
annoying my husband

my dissertation is...

an art historical study exploring the concept of embodied iconography, adapted from Warren T. Woodfin's theory of the embodied icon, across extant embroidered liturgical vestments from the 14th-century Latin West broadly.

my work includes...

publications
  • [Forthcoming insha'Allah] Mohammadi-Williams, Kiran Aliyah. "A textile stage: embodied iconography in the Syon vestment and the performance of the Mass." Gesta no. 65.2 (Fall 2026).
  • [Forthcoming insha’Allah] Mohammadi-Williams, Kiran Aliyah. “Where are all the hijabi librarians?: Keeping faith in LIS.” In Catalyzing Critical Hope in Libraries: Narratives of Challenge and Change. Edited by Ione Damasco and Kaetrena Kendrick. Association of College & Research Libraries, 2027.
  • [Forthcoming insha’Allah] Mohammadi-Williams, Kiran Aliyah. “Creating and hosting basic IIIF images and manifests using GitHub.” Programming Historian Fall 2026.
  • Williams, Kiran Aliyah. “Race and the medieval consciousness: perspectives on St. Maurice.” Oberlin On Second Thought Fall 2022. https://oberlinost.wordpress.com/2023/03/02/race-and-the-medieval-consciousness-perspectives-on-st-maurice/.
  • Williams, Kiran Aliyah. “The wand chooses the wizard: distinctions of Greco-Roman staffs, rods, and wands in ritual and myth.” The Macksey Journal 2, no. 1 (September 13, 2021). https://mackseyjournal.scholasticahq.com/article/28009-the-wand-chooses-the-wizard-distinctions-of-greco-roman-staffs-rods-and-wands-in-ritual-and-myth.
conference presentations
  • Mohammadi-Williams, Kiran Aliyah and Iliana Burgos. “Reclaiming the Digital: Centering Black Voices in DH Instruction.” Presented at the Digital Pedagogy Institute, virtual. August 2025.
  • Mohammadi-Williams, Kiran Aliyah. “Teaching Black Digital Humanities: Making Space in the Age of Big Tech.” Presented at the People of Color in Library and Information Science Summit, virtual. July 2025.
  • Mohammadi-Williams, Kiran Aliyah, Roopika Risam, and Jing Han. “Stuck on the List: Local Approaches to the DH Directory.” Panel presentation present at the Association for Computer Humanities 2025 conference, virtual, June 2025.
  • Mohammadi-Williams, Kiran Aliyah. “Mystery in Majesty: The Liturgical Potential of the Chormantel and Great Mantle of Empress Cunegunde.” Paper presented at the London Arts-Based Research Center Sacred Arts Conference, Oxford, England, 2025.
  • Mohammadi-Williams, Kiran Aliyah. “The Medievalists’ Shades of St. Maurice: Racial Descriptors across Disciplines.” Paper presented at the 60th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, 2025.
  • Mohammadi-Williams, Kiran Aliyah. “Using IIIF as a One-Stop Shop for Basic Web Literacy.” Presented at the 2024 International Image Interoperability Framework Annual Meeting, virtual, 2024.
paper projects
  • Of flowers & fiddles: the Elizabethan vestiarian conflict and the desanctification of the clerical body
  • The silkworm & the savior: Christological resonances in the production, processing, and properties of late medieval mulberry silk vestments
  • Of “good” rags and “bad” rags: women’s bodies, labour, and class in seventeenth-century English embroidered devotional books
  • Bloodstains in paradise: the mulberry tree in medieval English courtly and clerical consciousness
  • Augusta Savage and the Black classics: “race-ing” the classical sculptural form in the New Negro movement
software
  • Mohammadi-Williams, Kiran Aliyah. WaxBuilder. 1.0, GitHub, 2025.