Margaret Graves, specialist in the art of the Islamic world

Margaret Graves, Adrienne Minassian Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture, is a specialist in the art of the Islamic world, with a particular research focus on museum objects, the plastic arts (ceramics, metalwork, stone carving), and the acts and contexts of making in the medieval and modern eras. Her first monograph, Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam (2018), looked at three-dimensional medieval artworks that make formal and conceptual allusions to architecture, placing these acts of material allusion into medieval Islamic intellectual history. Her current book project, Invisible Hands, explores the craft skills of ceramics faking and forgery for the nineteenth- and twentieth-century antiquities market. Other ongoing research topics include contemporary art that explores the legacies of colonial-era craft reform and heritage management in the Middle East; relationships between international banking and the antiquities market; occult sciences in medieval Islamic craftsmanship; and collaborations with conservators on the material lives of doctored objects.