Dr. Kuehn’s research interests include Sufism, Islamic Visual and Material Culture, Islamic Aesthetics, Islam and Gender, Angels and Intermediary Beings in Transcultural Contexts, Religious Pluralism/Shared Sacred Sites, Environment and Ecology in Islam, Migration and Transcultural Dimensions of Objects, Images and Ideas as well as Comparative Religion.

Trained as an art historian (Dr. phil. magna cum laude, ‘with distinction’, in Islamic and East Christian Art History and Archaeology, Free University of Berlin, 2009; M.A. in Islamic and Central Asian/Chinese Art and Archaeology, SOAS University of London, 1998; B.A. in Chinese, Japanese and Korean Art and Archaeology, International Christian University, Tokyo, 1991), and working on religious symbolism for more than twenty years, she studies religion from a cross-cultural comparative perspective. Her background in Islamic, East Christian and East Asian art and archaeology, combined with extensive ethnographic fieldwork in South/Western Asia and Europe, as well as a museum career, has shaped her conceptualization of the artistic and religio-cultural relationship of the Islamic world between South/Western Asia and Europe. In the framework of World Heritage missions and other consulting activities for the UNESCO and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), she conducted regular missions to the Middle East between 1998 and 2008, in particular in collaboration with the Kuwait National Museum, Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah (al-Sabah Collection).

Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships including Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) under Horizon 2020, the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna/Science and Research Promotion, the National Museum of Ethnology (MINPAKU), Osaka, the Nantes Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), the Institute for Advanced Study of Aix-Marseille University – AMU (IMéRA), the European Institutes for Advanced Study Fellowship Programme (EURIAS), Iran Heritage Foundation (IHF), London, the Austrian Research Foundation, and the Orient-Institut Beirut der Max Weber Stiftung (OIB). 

Sara Kuehn’s work cuts across media, disciplinary, geographical and temporal boundaries. Among her recent publications are chapters and articles on Sufi relics, remains, and traces in Saintly Spheres and Islamic Landscapes: Emplacements of Spiritual Power across Time and Place (Brill 2020), on Sufi visual-material practice in the Balkans in Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World (Amsterdam University Press 2019), on antinomian modes of life and the associated bodily, social, and spiritual disciplines of itinerant dervishes in Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society (2018), and on the visions of female Sufi leaders in the Western Sufi tradition in Religion in Austria 4 (2018).

Her books include The Dragon in Medieval East Christian and Islamic Art (Brill 2011), joint winner of the 2013 World Prize for the Book of the Year of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Monsters or Bearers of Life-Giving Powers? Trans-Religious Migrations of an Ancient Western Asian Symbolism (Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi 2016). Edited books include Female Spiritual Visions: The Religious Visual Culture of Contemporary Female Islamic Mysticism (Women and Gender series, Leiden: Brill, forthcoming; co-edited with A. Buturovic) and The Intermediate Worlds of Angels. Islamic Representations of Celestial Beings in Transcultural Contexts (Beiruter Texte und Studien (BTS), Ergon-Verlag, Würzburg 2019; co-edited with S. Leder and H.-P. Pökel). Together with Dionigi Albera and Manoël Pénicaud she is guest editor of Religiographies 1/1, Special Issue “Holy Sites in the Mediterranean, Sharing and Division” (2022). She is currently exploring the visual culture of Sufism in Europe in a new book, provisionally titled Vision and Visuality in Western European Sufism.