Notes on Contributors
Molly Emma Aitken is Associate Professor at The City College of New York and The Graduate Center, CUNY. She has curated and published on a wide range of topics in South Asian art from jewellery to quilts. Her principal study is Mughal and Rajput painting of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Aitkenâs book The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) won CAAâs Charles Rufus Morey award in 2011 and the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize in 2012. Aitken is working on a monograph titled We Are All Women, which looks at erotised expressions of social and political relating in Mughal paintings.
Jake Benson is Research Associate for Persian Collections, John Rylands Research Institute and Library, University of Manchester. He currently catalogues Persian manuscripts held in the John Rylands Library. He defended his doctoral dissertation, âThe Advent of AbrÄ«: The First Wave of Paper Marbling During the Long 16th centuryâ at Leiden University in 2024. From 2012 to 2016, he worked as Curator and Senior Conservator for the Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation assisting the National Library of Egypt with managing their manuscript collections. Recent publications include an analysis of a Deccani album, âThe QitÊ¿at-i Khushkhatt Album: Authentication and Provenanceâ, in Iran and the Deccan: Persianate Art, Culture, and Talent in Circulation, 1400â1700, ed. Keelan Overton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), pp. 337â365.
Claus-Peter Haase is Hon. Professor of Islamic Art and Archaeology at Free University of Berlin, Institute of Art History. From 2001 to 2009, he served as the director of the Museum of Islamic Art, Berlin. From 1998 to 2001, he held the position of Professor of Islamic Art and Archaeology at Copenhagen University. Between 1985 and 1997, he worked in the Academy project Cataloguing Oriental Manuscripts in Germany. From 1987 to 2001, he also carried out excavations at the early Islamic site of Madinat al-Far/Hisn Maslama in Syria.
Emily Hannam is Curator of South Asia at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She formerly held curatorial roles at the British Museum and the Royal Collection Trust and curated exhibitions of South Asian paintings and Manuscripts in the Queenâs Galleries at Buckingham Palace (2018) and the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh (2020). She is author of Eastern Encounters: Four Centuries of Paintings and Manuscripts from the Indian Subcontinent (2018) and holds degrees from the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford.
Isabelle Imbert is an independent scholar and art advisor. She received her Ph.D. in Islamic Art History from the Sorbonne University in 2015, with a dissertation on âFlower Paintings in Iran and India (16thâ18th c.)â, focusing on the development of naturalistic floral representations in muraqqaÊ¿s and the assimilation, copy and diffusion of European botanical engravings. She is currently working on its publication. Her main research interests include artistic encounters between Europe, Iran and India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the tradition and practice of album compilation, as well as the constitution and trade of European collections, current art market practices and governing legislation.
Will Kwiatkowski is an independent epigraphist. He has published readings of Arabic, Persian and Turkish inscriptions in numerous catalogues for museums and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the David Collection.
Axel Langer is an art historian. He works as curator for Islamic art of the Near and Middle East at the Museum Rietberg in Zurich. His main focus lies on intercultural exchange. Various exhibitions on Persia and Europe in the seventeenth century, on blue and white ceramics in China, West Asia and Europe, and on textile art in the Qajar period attest to this. In 2019, he completed his PhD with a study on the reception of European and Indian art in seventeenth-century Persian painting. His last show in 2022 was dedicated to figurative representation in Islamic and Christian cultures.
J.P. Losty (1945â2021) was the curator of Indian manuscripts and paintings at the British Museum and British Library in London for thirty-four years until his retirement in 2005. He published extensively on illustrated Indian manuscripts and paintings in India from the eleventh to the nineteenth century. Some of his most important books include the ground-breaking Art of the Book in India (1982), Calcutta: City of Palaces (1990), The Ramayana: Love in Indiaâs Great Epic (2008), Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire (with Malini Roy, 2012) and Sita Ram: Picturesque Views of India, Lord Hastingâs Journey from Calcutta to the Punjab, 1814â1815 (2015). More recent publications include catalogues of two important Indian collections of Company paintings, in the Jagdish and Kamla Mittal Museum in Hyderabad (2016) and in the TAPI Collection (2019).
Laura E. Parodi teaches Islamic Art (and English for Communication) at the University of Genoa (Università degli Studi di Genova, Italy). She is the author of numerous essays on Mughal manuscript culture, court ceremonial, and gardens. Most recently, she contributed a chapter titled âA Dispersed Imperial Mughal Folio from the MintoâWantageâKevorkian Album Groupâ to the volume Persian Manuscripts & Paintings from the Berenson Collection, ed. Aysin Yoltar-Yıldırım (Villa I Tatti Series 35, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022). Her article âKabul: a Forgotten Mughal Capital: Gardens, City, and Court at the Turn of the Sixteenth Centuryâ (Muqarnas 38, 2021), pp. 113â153, won the Professor Hasan-Uddin Khan Article Award in 2022.
Malini Roy (PhD, School of Oriental and African Studies) is the Head of Visual Arts at the British Library. She specialises in South Asian art, with a particular interest in later Mughal paintings. In 2008, she curated and authored 50 Ã India: The 50 Most Beautiful Miniatures from the Rijksmuseum before joining the British Library as Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs. In recent years, Roy has co-authored several publications including Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire (British Library, 2012) and Animals: Art, Science and Sound (British Library, 2023).
John Seyller Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Vermont, has done ground-breaking work in numerous areas of Indian painting. One seminal article deciphered and analysed thousands of inspection notes on hundreds of manuscripts formerly in the imperial Mughal library, recording the manuscriptsâ history of ownership, rate of perusal, valuation, and qualitative ranking. He has produced exemplary studies of many major Mughal and Deccani artists, and organized the international exhibition The Adventures of Hamza (2002â2003). He has also co-authored with Jagdish Mittal six pioneering catalogues of paintings in the Jagdish and Kamla Mittal Museum of India Art, Hyderabad.
Parul Singh is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the interdisciplinary program 4A Laboratory: Art Histories, Archaeologies, Anthropologies, Aesthetics of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in FlorenzâMax-Planck-Institut, supported by the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. She specialises in pre-modern visual and material culture with a focus on South Asian art. Foregrounding issues of identity, her research looks at key moments of cross-cultural encounters embodied in objects and practicesâthrough the fluidity of their function, circulation, citation, and adaptation.
Susan Stronge is a Senior Curator in the Asian Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and specialises in the court arts of the Mughal empire, and of Tipu Sultan of Mysore and Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the first Sikh ruler of the Punjab. She is the curator of the V&Aâs major exhibition The Great Mughals: Art, Opulence and Architecture covering the arts of the reigns of Akbar (r. 1556â1605), Jahangir (r. 1605â1627) and Shah Jahan (r. 1628â1658). A book with contributions by leading specialists accompanies the exhibition.
Friederike Weis is Research Associate in Transcultural Studies at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. She was previously a researcher at the Museum für Asiatische Kunst in Berlin, where she worked on eighteenth-century Indian albums collected by Europeans. She is a specialist in Persianate muraqqaÊ¿s and illustrated Islamic manuscripts. With a focus on transcultural art history, she has written and co-edited several articles and books, including The Diez Albums: Contexts and Contents, ed. Julia Gonnella, Friederike Weis, Christoph Rauch (Leiden: Brill, 2016), and âHow the Persian Qalam Caused the Chinese Brush to Break: The Bahram Mirza Album Revisitedâ, Muqarnas 37 (2020), pp. 63â109.