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From Pen to Type and Back: Calligraphy, Typography, and Revival

This moderated roundtable explores how calligraphic traditions across different cultures have shaped, informed, and been transformed by typography. Moving across historical and contemporary contexts, the discussion considers how letterforms transition between the hand, print, mechanical reproduction, and digital environments, and how these shifts affect visual language, cultural continuity, and design.

The panel approaches this relationship through different historical and contemporary perspectives, examining the emergence of new visual forms in response to modernity and reproduction, the work of practitioners who bridged calligraphic practice and the technical demands of typography, and contemporary revivals of calligraphic forms through type design, digital tools, and renewed engagement with craft.

Situated Between Voices and Times, the roundtable considers typography as a space of cultural translation, where inherited letterforms are adapted, standardized, reinterpreted, and carried into new visual futures.

Sami De Giosa
Speaker

Sami De Giosa

Sami L. De Giosa is currently assistant professor at University of Sharjah. He was also the head of the Islamic Museum atthe Sheikh Abdullah Al-Salem center in Kuwait, a Research Fellow at SOAS Universityof London in the department of Cultures and Languages and a senior Barakat fellow atthe University of Oxford. His various interests include the art and architectural history of Mecca and Madinah,the arts of the Mamluks and museum studies in the Arab world and the wider Middle East