Nancy Um is Associate Director for Research and Knowledge Creation at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. In her division, she oversees five departments: the Getty Scholars Program, Research Projects & Academic Outreach, the Getty Provenance Index, the Getty Vocabulary Program, and Digital Art History. From 2001 to 2022, she was a faculty member in the department of art history at Binghamton University. She also served as the associate dean for faculty development and inclusion at Harpur College of Arts and Sciences at Binghamton University from 2019 to 2022.
She received her MA and PhD in art history from UCLA. Her research explores the Islamic world from the perspective of the coast, with a focus on material, visual, and built culture on the Arabian Peninsula and around the rims of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Her first book, The Merchant Houses of Mocha: Trade and Architecture in an Indian Ocean Port (University of Washington Press, 2009) relies upon a cross-section of visual, architectural, and textual sources to present the early modern coastal city of Mocha as a space that was nested within wider world networks, structured to communicate with far-flung ports and cities across a vast matrix of exchange. Her second book, Shipped but not Sold: Material Culture and the Social Protocols of Trade during Yemen’s Age of Coffee (University of Hawai’i Press, 2017), explores the material practices and informal social protocols that undergirded the overseas trade in 18th C Yemen. She has received research fellowships from the Fulbright program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Getty Foundation, and the American Institute for Yemeni Studies. From 2015-2018, she served as the Reviews Editor for The Art Bulletin. She is currently President-Elect of the Historians of Islamic Art Association.
Nancy Um also studies the changing professional landscape of art history as a discipline and the impact of digital transformation on humanities research.
