Sylvia Wu studies the architecture and material cultures of the medieval and early modern Indian Ocean world, with a focus on Muslim communities in South China and their multifaceted engagement with the region’s other littoral 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 recent historical moments when the formal features of mosque architecture in the country acquired layered symbolic meanings that encompass, and often conflate, religious, nationalist, and ethnic significance.
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, postmedieval, and the Journal of Chinese Religions.