Description

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Nine essays first presented at the Historians of Islamic Art Association’s seventh biennial symposium, entitled “Regime Change.”

The essays collected in this volume highlight some of the regimes of thought and changing trends that structure the field of Islamic art history. The authors present new research exploring the intentions of patrons, the agency of craftsmen, and their responses to previous artistic production, thereby allowing artifacts and monuments to be set within their historical, social, and artistic contexts.

In their contributions, Annabel Teh Gallop, Dmitry Bondarev, and Umberto Bongianino discuss significant changes to Qur’an production due to dynastic and political regime changes in Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, as well as in Borno and Morocco in Africa. Corinne Mühlemann looks at changes in the role and status of designers and weavers making silk in Khurasan in the post-Mongol period. Lisa Golombek, Michael Chagnon, and Farshid Emami explore Safavid art and architecture, focusing on the material and sensorial qualities of a group of tiled arch panels tiles with narrative scenes, a delicately painted vase, and the clocks of the main square of seventeenth-century Isfahan. Regime change also comes about through technological shifts, and Ulrich Marzolph and Yasemin Gencer ask how the rise of photography and new printing techniques shaped the production, exchange, and transmission of images in Iran and Turkey.
 

About the Author

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Christiane Gruber is professor of Islamic art in the History of Art Department at the University of Michigan as well as the founding director of Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online. Her scholarship explores medieval to contemporary Islamic art. Her recent books include The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images and The Image Debate: Figural Representation in Islam and Across the World, also published by Gingko.

Bihter Esener is lecturer of medieval Mediterranean and Islamic art in the History of Art Department at the University of Michigan. She is an art historian of the visual and material cultures of the medieval Islamic world and one of the founding members of Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online.

Praise For…

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“The articles in this handsome volume reflect the broad range of research interests, issues and methodologies pursued within the Historians of Islamic Art Association community and highlight current, innovative developments in the study of Islamic material culture and the visual arts. In the aggregate they also offer multiple perspectives on the concept of ‘regime change’: historical, typological, technological, and—most intriguingly—metaphorical and symbolic.”
— Dr. Marianna Shreve Simpson, Past President (2011-13), Historians of Islamic Art Association

“The articles in this volume amply fulfil the promise of its title. They exemplify the recent expansion of Islamic art into previously underresearched areas such as southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the conceptual exploration of new fields of sensory and auditory matters, and temporal extension into the twentieth century. The shift to looser definitional boundaries is much to be welcomed.”
 
— Prof. Bernard O’Kane, The American University in Cairo