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Norma Jean Calderwood Hybrid Panel Discussion: “Exploring al-Qazwini’s Cosmology The Wonders of Creation and Rarities of Existence with Ladan Akbarnia, Emine Fetvacı, Travis Zadeh, and Margaret Graves”

Monday, February 10

6:00–7:30 pm

Register to attend on Zoom

Register to attend in person

 

The annual Norma Jean Calderwood Lecture Series in Islamic and Asian Art celebrates the current exhibition at the McMullen Museum of Art, Wonders of Creation, based on the encyclopedic cosmography written by thirteenth-century Islamic scholar Zakariyya al-Qazwini (d. 1283) The Wonders of Creation and Rarities of Existence. To explore Qazwini’s text and its connections to the exhibition, the Museum presents this panel discussion with Yale Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and author of Wonders and Rarities (2023) Travis Zadeh, curator Ladan Akbarnia of the San Diego Museum of Art, Boston College Norma Jean Calderwood University Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture Emine Fetvacı, and Brown University Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture Margaret Graves. Guests may join via Zoom or register to attend in person. Light refreshments will be provided following the lecture at the McMullen Museum. 

 

Ladan Akbarnia: “Why Qazwini? The Cosmography as a Methodological Framework for Islamic Art History”

Ladan Akbarnia (PhD, Harvard University) is curator of South Asian and Islamic art at the San Diego Museum of Art and curator of Wonders of Creation: Art, Science & Innovation in the Islamic World. A specialist in Islamic visual culture, her publications address cross-cultural transmissions in Iran, Central Asia, and South Asia; Sufism; contemporary art; and methodologies of museum display. Previously, she was assistant keeper & curator of Islamic collections and lead curator for the Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World at the British Museum (2010–19); Hagop Kevorkian Associate Curator of Islamic Art at the Brooklyn Museum (2007–10), where she organized a reinstallation of the Islamic collection and Light of the Sufis: The Mystical Arts of Islam (2009–10); and executive director of the Iran Heritage Foundation in London (2009–10). She has also served as a Commissioner of Arts and Culture for San Diego County since 2023.

 

Margaret Graves: “Matter Transformed: The Wondrous Arts of Fire and Earth”

Margaret S. 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 research focus on the plastic arts of ceramic, metalwork, and stone carving in the medieval era and the nineteenth century. She received her PhD in 2010 from the University of Edinburgh and taught at Indiana University before joining Brown in 2023.

 

Travis Zadeh: “Qawzini and the House of Wonders”

Professor Travis Zadeh is a scholar of Islamic intellectual and cultural history. He currently serves as the chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University, where he also chairs the Council on Middle East Studies. His research focuses on the connected histories of science, magic, and religion, as well as on law, literature, and philosophy.