Persis Berlekamp
Contact Information
250 Cochrane Woods Art Center
5540 South Greenwood Ave
773.702.0250
berlekam@uchicago.edu
Ph.D. Harvard University - Islamic art and architecture, with research specialization in Arabic and Persian manuscripts of the late Abbasid and Mongol periods (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries). Current research interests include Neoplatonic cosmography and the imaging of natural history, alchemy, and astrology; the application of medieval Islamic traditions of medical illustration to Chinese medicine; and how theoretical understandings of talismans relate to their visual forms.
Selected Publications
- Wonder, Image, and Cosmos in Medieval Islam. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.
- "The Limits of Artistic Exchange in Fourteenth-Century Tabriz: The Paradox of Rashid Al-Din's Book on Chinese Medicine," forthcoming in Muqarnas 27 (2010).
- Review of Bernard O'Kane, ed., The Iconography of Islamic Art: Studies in Honour of Robert Hillenbrand, in Journal of Near Eastern Studies (Spring, 2010).
- "From Iraq to Fars: Tracking Cultural Transformations through the 1322 Qazwini `Aja'ib Manuscript," in Handbücher der Orientalistik, 90, Arab Painting: Text and Image in Illustrated Arabic Manuscripts, ed. Anna Contadini (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 73-91.
- "Painting as Persuasion: A Visual Defense of Alchemy in an Islamic Manuscript of the Mongol Period" Muqarnas 20 (2003): 35-59 (2003)
- Review of The Persian Album, 1400-1600: From Dispersal to Collection by David Roxburgh, caa.reviews, <http://www.caareviews.org/> 2006.
- "al-Qazwini,"in Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages 2, Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia, (London: Routledge, 2006)