Sarah Slingluff

Sarah Slingluff, PhD is a specialist in the material culture of medieval al-Andalus (Spain and Portugal). Her research examines fortifications in the center of the Iberian Peninsula (Castilla-La Mancha) in the eighth through twelfth centuries. Her approaches are situated at the intersections of art history, archaeology, history, media studies, and cultural representation.

She earned her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Edinburgh in 2025. Prior to joining the University of Maryland as the Post Doctoral Fellow in Islamic Art, she worked at the Walters Art Museum. She concurrently holds the position of Lead Educator for the Digital Lab for Islamic Visual Culture and Collections. In this role she works with game industry professionals to decolonize video games. In this role she has worked on several video games and with numerous companies, most notably as a consultant for Assassin's Creed, Mirage. 

Her work explores how visual culture—particularly in contemporary digital media and gaming—engages with and reimagines historical traditions, with a special focus on medieval Islamicate societies and transregional artistic exchange. She brings together methods from art history, game studies, and cultural theory to analyze how digital platforms construct and circulate narratives of the past.