Finbarr Barry Flood | New York University (original) (raw)

Books by Finbarr Barry Flood

Technologies de dévotion dans les arts de l'Islam : Pèlerins, reliques et copies, 2019

There Where You are Not - Selected Writings of Kamal Boullata, 2019

These invigorating reference volumes chart the influence of key ideas, discourses, and theories o... more These invigorating reference volumes chart the influence of key ideas, discourses, and theories on art, and the way that it is taught, thought of, and talked about throughout the English-speaking world. Each volume brings together a team of respected international scholars to debate the state of research within traditional subfields of art history as well as in more innovative, thematic configurations. Representing the best of the scholarship governing the field and pointing toward future trends and across disciplines, the Wiley Blackwell Companions to Art History series provides a magisterial, state-of-the-art synthesis of art history.

A Companion to Islamic art and Architecture 2, 2017

Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval 'Hindu-Muslim' Encounter, 2009

Conferences by Finbarr Barry Flood

Although the term incorporation (and its cognates in many Latinate languages) often functions met... more Although the term incorporation (and its cognates in many Latinate languages) often functions metaphorically, its ability to denote the integration of any two entities is intimately linked to the centrality of the body, the corpus. Reflecting the recent material and sensory turns across the humanities, this two-day event is intended to highlight a range of practices in which words and images were consumed by being taken into the body, quite literally incorporated. Whether undertaken for the purposes of memorization, prophylaxis, or chastisement (all are documented), such practices imply that certain kinds of images and words can be so fully consumed as to be incorporated into the human body, to become part of its very substance.

The past two decades have been marked by a renewed concern with the agency, presence, and ontolog... more The past two decades have been marked by a renewed concern with the agency, presence, and ontological status of crafted things, witnessed in a shift of interest across several fields from questions of iconography and meaning to questions of affect and efficacy. These developments call into question some of the binary oppositions that are foundational to the epistemologies and ontologies of Enlightenment (and post-Enlightenment) thought: animate-inanimate, subject-object, material-meaning, and so forth. They raise significant questions about the nature and operation of things in the world, their materiality, their ability to act or inspire action, and their relation to speech, texts, and words. Acknowledging the need for an interdisciplinary approach to the profound questions raised by these developments, the conference aims to examine the historical antecedents for these 'new' ways of thinking about the material world, to consider their implications, and to imagine the ways in which they might help us develop novel approaches to images, things, and words.

Papers by Finbarr Barry Flood

Al-Usur al-Wusta, 2024

Sitting at my laptop, I have a clear view of a small globular blue and white vessel perched on a ... more Sitting at my laptop, I have a clear view of a small globular blue and white vessel perched on a nearby shelf (Fig. 1). Perhaps the base of a kalian, or more likely a vase, it was acquired in a junk shop in Krakow about fifteen years ago. Its presence serves as a perpetual reminder

Art Bulletin 104/4, 2022

This conversation between two historians, one of Islamic art and architecture and the other of Eu... more This conversation between two historians, one of Islamic art and architecture and the other of European medieval art and architecture, took place in person and virtually across the Atlantic in summer and autumn of 2021. finbarr barry flood: Let us begin with obvious questions: what is global art history, what is premodern globalism, and how do those two things relate? My impression is that, as currently conceived, global art history encompasses two quite distinct approaches. One endeavors to be inclusive by comparison, offering a synchronic snapshot of what is or was happening in various parts of the globe, for example, or taking a certain date or century as its focus. Another approach focuses on histories of transregional connectivity, which is the case with our forthcoming book Archives of Flotsam: Objects and Early Globalism. 1 However, both approaches are still very much shaped by the legacy of the European Enlightenment and thus come with specific cultural baggage, which it might not be possible to fully escape. beate fricke: The major challenge for both approaches is that art historians have very different kinds of archives and archival traditions resulting in an "asymmetry of forms of knowledge," to use Parul Dave-Mukherji's terminology. 2 In our collaboration, we considered a range of case studies of premodern connectivity for which epigraphic or textual evidence was largely lacking. We looked at objects that have surfaced on the shores of another culture-like flotsam-and have lost the traces of their culture of origin, arriving without any accompanying written information about their former origin, function, or meaning. If we compare a culture with a surviving textual tradition with a culture without preserved written sources, we tend to privilege the former and inscribe assumptions onto the latter. We can observe the ramifications of such biases, for example, in the display of Dr. Marcel Ebnöther's (1920-2008) collection at the Museum zu Allerheiligen in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, in which the art of diverse premodern cultures is understood by comparison under (Eurocentric) rubrics like portraiture (Fig. 1). 3 flood: The example brings us to the rubric of the "premodern," a category not unrelated to the idea of the global. According to some commentators, for instance, one can only talk about global art history when there is a consciousness of the entire globe, in the sense of all five continents. Such an approach, often favored by early modernists, assumes that global history begins only around 1500, effectively reinscribing Europe at the heart of things in perpetuity. 4 There is the related question of temporality, or at least temporal categories. The marginalization implied in the terms "medieval" or "Middle Ages"-with their privileging of classical

In the Name of the Image - Figurative Representation in Islamic and Christian Cultures, 2022

Technologies de dévotion dans les arts de l'Islam : Pèlerins, reliques et copies, 2019

There Where You are Not - Selected Writings of Kamal Boullata, 2019

A Companion to Islamic art and Architecture 2, 2017

Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval 'Hindu-Muslim' Encounter, 2009

Al-Usur al-Wusta, 2024

Art Bulletin 104/4, 2022

In the Name of the Image - Figurative Representation in Islamic and Christian Cultures, 2022

Introduction to Selected Writings of Kamal Boullata

Encyclopaedia of Islam 3, 2019

Arab chroniclers depict the Mongol invasion of Iraq in the thirteenth century as uniquely destruc... more Arab chroniclers depict the Mongol invasion of Iraq in the thirteenth century as uniquely destructive. Eight centuries later, its specter was sufficiently enduring and potent to be invoked by Saddam Hussein in an apocalyptic speech made in 2003 to rally support against the impending American-led invasion of Iraq. Yet there are numerous indications that early rule by the Mongols was by no means marked by destruction and ruin. These include inscriptions such as those preserved until recently in the monastic church of the Christian saint Mar Behnam, 30 kilometers southeast of Mosul. One, inscribed in the ancient Aramaic language of Syriac, detailed how in 1295 a Mongol raiding party stole the monastery's gold and silver, including its precious liturgical vessels. The inscription went on to record that, following a complaint from one of the monastery's monks, the Il-Khan Baidu, the Mongol ruler of Iran and Iraq, a Muslim with Christian sympathies, not only restored all that had been looted, but made amends by means of a generous gift to the shrine of the saint. Shortly afterward, the ecumenism, generosity, and rectitude of the Il-Khan were recognized in an inscription on the saint's grave invoking blessings on him and his court. This inscription was written in Uighur, a Central Asian Turkic language with its own script, the sole example of a medieval Uighur inscription documented from the Middle East (Harrak and Ruji 2004). Neither the inscriptions nor the shrine and monastery with which they were associated exist today. In the spring of 2015, agents of Da'esh, the so-called Islamic State (IS), dynamited the monastic complex, among whose unique treasures were two twelfth-or thirteenth-century life-size stucco sculptures of Mar Behnam and his sister, both martyred by their own father in the fourth century. The loss of these unique testimonies to the cultural and religious heterogeneity of the Jazira region of northern Iraq, Syria, and southern Turkey is just one entry in a staggering catalogue of deliberate destruction that includes Iraqi and Syrian monuments associated with Christian, Muslim (both Shi'i and Sunni), and Yazidi communities. The physical destruction of communal connective tissues—the archives, artifacts, and monuments in which complex micro-histories were instantiated—means that there are now things about these pasts that cannot and never will be known. My own interest in Islamic architecture was galvanized by living in northern Iraq for several months in 1986. It was crystallized by time spent in Syria in the years following, some of it working on a German-Syrian excavation in Raqqa, now the capital of the Islamic State. On the weekends in Iraq, I traveled from Tell Afar, a town with a large Turkman minority, to places