Karen Pinto, Assistant Professor of History, presented "Portraits of 'the West' in Arab Maps and Poetry" at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Ahmanson Conference titled "Mapping Medieval Geographies: Cartography and Geographical Thought in the Latin West and Beyond, 300-1600," held at University of California Los Angeles, on May 28-30, 2009. Pinto's paper analyzed the representation of the "Islamic West" (the Maghreb) in medieval Islamic maps from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries and proposed a new methodology of interpreting medieval Islamic maps through an analysis of different levels of gaze and of Hispano Arabic poetry.