Persis Berlekamp

Biography

Persis Berlekamp teaches courses in Islamic art and architecture. Most of her research focuses on the roles the visual arts played within the major cultural and intellectual debates of the late medieval Islamic world (13th-15th centuries). As in our own time, this period saw large scale population movements, complicated cultural encounters, and intense contestation of heritage questions. And as in our own time, the arts necessarily engaged with all of the above. Yet, the range of ways this happened in an era before the Enlightenment, the rise of nation states, and the Industrial Revolution, was often quite different from what we see today. Understanding how late medieval Islamic art engaged with the debates that mattered in the world in which it was made lets us to see the art itself differently, while also highlighting some of the historically specific aspects of our own assumptions and experience.

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.

Berlekamp’s current book project, Petrified Powers: Medieval Islamic Talismans analyzes medieval Islamic "talismans," an English word deriving in part from the Arabic "tilasm" and its Persian and Turkish cognates. Along with ancient Greek and Byzantine talismans, medieval Islamic talismans are historically foundational to modern understandings of the "talisman," and yet, they are not at all limited to the popular or folkloric amulets that modern audiences often expect. Focusing this time on the period before the Mongol Conquest, this book will analyze a wide variety of objects, sculptures, and architectural reliefs, in keeping with ways the term "tilasm" and its cognates are used in medieval Islamic sources. While a core density of the visual sources come from eastern Anatolia, northern Syria, and northern Iraq, others come from elsewhere in the Middle East, or from northeast Iran and Central Asia. Almost all of them bring to the fore medieval Islamic culture’s conflicted engagement with its rich inheritance of astrological, medicinal, scribal, and other traditions from Byzantium to India. 

Another enduring research focus is a particularly challenging illustrated Persian manuscript on Chinese medicine made for the vizier, historian, doctor, and patron Rashid al-Din (d. 1318). Although little known, it is the indispensable, corrective counterexample to Rashid al-Din’s famous illustrated history project. It reshapes what we understand about institutional paradigms for the production of art and knowledge that emerged in early fourteenth-century Iran, and that are considered paradigmatic for the court workshops of the late medieval and early modern Islamic world.

Berlekamp is an active member of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies Executive Committee and is Affiliated Faculty in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

Publications

“Symmetry, Sympathy, and Sensation: Talismanic Efficacy and Slippery Iconographies in Early Thirteenth-Century Iraq, Syria, and Anatolia,” Representations, Vol. 133 No. 1, University of California Press (Winter 2016)

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2016

“Administering Art, History, and Science in the Mongol Empire: Rashid al-Din and Bolad Chengxiang,” co-authored with Vivienne Lo and Yidan Wang, in Pearls on a String: Art in the Age of Great Islamic Empires, ed. Amy Landau (Baltimore and Seattle: Walters Art Museum and Washington University Press, 2015)

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2015

“Visible Art, Invisible Knowledge,” contribution to the “Roundtable: Studying Visual Culture” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, 3 (2013)

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2013

“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)

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2007

“al-Qazwini,” in Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages 2, Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia (London: Routledge, 2006)

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2006

Profiles

Andrei Pop
Andrei Pop
Modern Art and Aesthetics
Department Chair
CWAC 162 | Tuesdays 1-2pm or by appointment.
773.702.0278
Niall Atkinson
Niall Atkinson
Medieval and Renaissance Architecture and Urban History
CWAC 260
773.702.0270
Wei-Cheng Lin
Wei-Cheng Lin
Chinese Art and Architecture
Architectural Studies Advisor
CWAC 268 | Office Hours: Wednesdays 9-10am and 12-1pm
773.702.0268
2006-07
Iowa State University
Assistant Professor, East Asian Art and Architecture
Potters Wheel
Richard Neer
Ancient Greek Art and Architecture
CWAC 259
773.702.5890
Megan Sullivan
Megan Sullivan
Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art
CWAC 272
773.702.5126