ABOUT THIS BOOKNine 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.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHYChristiane 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.