Persis Berlekamp is the Guitty Azarpay Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Art. She is Associate Professor of Art History and the College at The University of Chicago, where she has taught since 2005, and where she is also affiliated with the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. The objects of her research have included manuscripts, architectural reliefs, and metalwork of the late medieval Islamic world, broadly defined (13th-15th C).
Across media and social milieu, an abiding concern of her research has been the visual arts’ capacity to both challenge and assert regimes of expertise in times of profound change. As in our own time, this was an era of large-scale migrations, complicated realignments, and conflicting investments in which cultural inheritances mattered. And as in our own time, the arts were necessarily imbricated in all the above. Understanding how this was so expands our view of those arts, while also sharpening our awareness of both the commonality and the specificity of our historical moment.
Her current research project, Petrified Powers: Medieval Arts of Protection from Afghanistan to Anatolia, foregrounds visual objects and expertise that were highly sought during the Mongol Conquest. Demand for them simultaneously intensified and scrambled the medieval Islamic world’s conflicted engagement with ancient Greek, Persian, and Indian lapidary, astrological, and metallurgic traditions.
Berlekamp is the author of Wonder, Image, and Cosmos in Medieval Islam (Yale University Press, 2011), an analysis of illustrated Arabic and Persian wonders-of-creation manuscripts produced in the wake of the Mongol Conquests of Iran and Iraq. This was a Choice Outstanding Academic 2012 Title for Art and Architecture and was reviewed in The Art Newspaper, The Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, West 86th, The Journal of Islamic Studies, and Osmanlı Araştırmaları.
