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Date
Time
7:00 pm
Venue
SOAS, Phillips Building
Room
Khalili Lecture Theatre (KLT)
Event type
Lecture

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In this illustrated lecture, Walter Denny will explore some of the results of this phenomenon, from portraiture to public ceremony, as documented by Western artists.

It is commonplace to recognize how art crosses geographical and cultural borders. From Imperial Roman artistic fads focused on Persia, through the Medieval European fixation on complex woven silks from the east, and the global pursuit of Chinese porcelain and the secret of its manufacture, the history of commerce in art tells countless stories of boundary crossings, imitations, adaptations, and appropriations.  

The same is true of Islamic carpets, which beginning in the 14th century traveled to Central Asia, Japan, Europe, and North America, where they were prized, painted, and not infrequently imitated in local products.  But unlike other media, Islamic carpets in Europe also acquired both overt and subtle political and social meanings, which have over the past half-millennium left a distinct imprint on the arts of Europe.

The Hadassah and Daniel Khalili Memorial Lecture in Islamic Art and Culture.

About the speaker

Walter Denny is Distinguished Professor of the History of Art and Architecture Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, specializing in the art of the Islamic world.  From 2007 to 2017 he served as Senior Consultant in the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  

After undergraduate study at Robert College (Istanbul), Grinnell College and Oberlin College, and graduate studies at Harvard and at Istanbul Technical University, he completed his Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard in 1970, beginning his teaching career at UMass/Amherst in September of that year, and retiring in May 2023.  His research interests and publications concentrate in the Ottoman Turkish sphere, and the history of Islamic carpets and textiles.  

He has also taught, pursued research, and published on the thousand-year history of east-west interchange in European culture.  He lectures frequently on a variety of topics in the U.S. and abroad. He is currently Chair of the Visiting Committee for the Department of Textile Conservation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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