Persis Berlekamp

Persis Berlekamp is an Associate Visiting Professor holding the Azarpay Distinguished Visitorship in the Arts of Iran and Central Asia. She is also Associate Professor Emerita of Art History and the College at the University of Chicago, where she taught from 2005 to 2025. Her work explores how visual arts shaped cultural, social, and intellectual debates in the late medieval Islamic world (13th–15th centuries). The thirteenth-century Mongol Conquest serves as the recognized pivot between earlier and later periods of Islamic art, as several previously foreign visual motifs entered the region's artistic vocabulary at this time. Berlekamp complicates this established framework by tending to the Conquest’s protracted duration, focusing on the inventiveness and mobility that characterized how multiple generations of the region’s creatives responded to this extended trauma. She is the author of Wonder, Image, and Cosmos in Medieval Islam (Yale University Press, 2011), which analyzes illustrated wonders-of-creation manuscripts from post-Conquest Iran and Iraq. Her current project, Placing Stones, Moving Metals, analyzes surviving talismanic stone and metal arts of protection in relation to the migration routes of known armies, astrologers, and scholars who fled the Mongol advances into Central Asia and Iran for other parts of the Islamic world. Considered collectively, these objects reveal how thirteenth-century creatives fused invention and inheritance to survive and reshape their world.