2 pm, Hagen Room (Elvehjem 150): Workshop
For graduate students and faculty/staff. This workshop will consist of a discussion of Professor Graves’s recent article on the conceptualization of images in the medieval Islamic world. For a copy, please contact Professor Jennifer Pruitt (jpruitt@wisc.edu).
5 pm, Elvehjem L150: Public Lecture
Islamic Ceramics and Other Fictions of Capital: Fabricating the Middle East for Modern Markets”
Historical ceramics from the Islamic world are now held in elite collections worldwide. Many migrated westward during the late 19th-/early 20th-century heyday of Islamic art collecting, when craft skills in the Middle East were redirected towards a new market generated by the colonial project’s fanatical harvesting of artefacts: the faking, forging, and fictionalizing of antiquities. This lecture re-encounters the fabrication of physical history in the Middle East, especially ceramics, as a local form of highly skilled craft participation in modern global capitalism. The fictionalized objects of Islamic ceramics collecting suture together multiple temporalities with skill and ingenuity, creating new objects of delight for elite collectors and asking us to think again about what we value most in the artifacts of the medieval past.
Margaret Graves is the Adrienne Minassian Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture in Honor of Marilyn Jenkins-Madina, in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University. She is a specialist in the art of the Islamic world, with a primary research focus on the plastic arts of ceramic, metalwork, and stonecarving in the medieval era and the nineteenth century. She received her PhD in 2010 from the University of Edinburgh and taught at Indiana University from 2012 before joining Brown University in 2023. She publishes on the art of the Islamic world and beyond, most recently the co-authored Ceramic Art (Princeton University Press, 2023).
Co-sponsored by the Anonymous Fund, the Jay and Ruth Halls Visiting Scholar Fund, the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies, the African Cultural Studies Program, the Middle East Studies Program, and the Departments of Art, Art History, and History.
