Jaimee Comstock-Skipp | University of Oxford (original) (raw)
Papers by Jaimee Comstock-Skipp
The presentation focuses on the Tavārīkh-i Guzīda-yi Nusratnāma (chronicle of select histories) i... more The presentation focuses on the Tavārīkh-i Guzīda-yi Nusratnāma (chronicle of select histories) illustrated manuscript located in the British Library, and the process of its production spanning several decades. It is an important prose Turkic-language chronicle consisting of composite textual sources. The work is held to be the first Abu'l-Khairid (commonly known as Shaybanid or Uzbek) historiographic composition and is indebted to older dynastic chronicles. Its illustrations depict Abu'l-Khairid rulers and their Mongol predecessors, and glorifies their descent traced through Chinggis Khan’s eldest son Jūchī. The pictorial schema combines a few fine paintings attributed to mid 16th-century Bukhara, with the majority invoking pictures from much earlier manuscripts from the Ilkhanid and Timurid dynasties. The discussion first overviews the text, then analyzes the single illustrated copy held in London, and explains the art’s stylistic archaism that is the key to comprehending its visual program.
The appropriation of cultural forms from select dynasties to secure political legitimacy is taking place in Central Asia today in light of independence from the Soviet Union. The nations of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan are harnessing Abu'l-Khairid artistic heritage for present politicizing, legitimizing, and nationalizing aims. This underscores the importance of teasing out cross-cultural and transregional factors at play in the 16th century, and I shall do so through examining the illustrated historical chronicle that is of great significance to the countries of Central Asia.
The Central Asian Manuscript Heritage in Cambridge University’s Collections, Part Two, The Cultural Legacy of Uzbekistan series vol. LXXIII (Tashkent: Silk Road Media, 2024)., 2024
In-depth analysis of a Shāhnāma held in the Ancient India and Iran Trust in Cambridge (AIIT ms. P... more In-depth analysis of a Shāhnāma held in the Ancient India and Iran Trust in Cambridge (AIIT ms. Pers. 2.01 BD), touching on manuscript production in Khurasan and Transoxiana circa late 16th -- early 17th centuries.
International Institute for Asian Studies, The Newsletter No. 95, 2023
Introduction to the manuscript arts of the Abu’l-Khayrid (Shaybanid) dynasty, overview of the per... more Introduction to the manuscript arts of the Abu’l-Khayrid (Shaybanid) dynasty, overview of the periodization of these materials, and summary of the scholarship on them to date.
Published by the International Institute for Asian Studies, in The Newsletter No. 95 (Summer 2023): pp. 28-29. https://www.iias.asia/the-newsletter
Memory and Commemoration across Central Asia, 2023
Published in Memory and Commemoration across Central Asia, eds. Gabrielle van den Berg and Elena ... more Published in Memory and Commemoration across Central Asia, eds. Gabrielle van den Berg and Elena Paskaleva, 53-89 (Leiden: Brill, 2023).
This article examines a Turkic-language Shahnama manuscript housed in the Center of Written Heritage at the National Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan. It identifies its text as Âmidî’s translation of Firdausi’s work which was a popular version in the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. Analysis of its unfinished illustrations compares them to other productions attributed to Khurasan in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, and narrows the scope to the last decade and a half. This refined provenance suggests that the visual schema to the Shahnama manuscript located in Tajikistan was added during the period in which the Abu’l-Khairid Shibanids conquered the Safavids and took over eastern Iran between 1588–1598. How the object migrated from the Ottoman sphere to Transoxiana cannot be proven. The presented case study instead intimates the Uzbek–Ottoman exchanges in arts of the book contributing to the object’s production, and the state of manuscripts manufactured in late-century Herat and broader Khurasan. Despite the political turmoil, artistic talent from multiple centres congregated in this region in which staff, manuscripts, and their intended buyers crossed multiple dynastic lines.
in ‘A Historiography of Persian Art: Past, Present and Future’, Journal of Art Historiography, Number 28 (June 2023), guest-edited by Yuka Kadoi and András Barati. https://arthistoriography.wordpress.com/28-jun23/, 2023
In treating illustrated Persian-language manuscript arts from the medieval and early-modern perio... more In treating illustrated Persian-language manuscript arts from the medieval and early-modern periods, dynasties have come to be associated with Iran and their art forms labelled ‘Persian’ and ‘Iranian’. Materials from sixteenth-century Central Asia— implying the Abu’l-Khairid dynasty (commonly called Shaybanid Uzbek, in power 1500—1599)—challenge this classification. Scholarship has witnessed intellectual fissures dividing Iran from Central Asia, and Russian-speaking and Anglophone scholars from each other. These are not pedantic trivialities, but deliberate intrusions of national and political agendas into art historical analyses. The geographic split partitioning Iran from Central Asia has its origins in the historical battles waged between the Safavids and Abu’l-Khairids across the sixteenth century, while the linguistic and ideological rift separating English- and Russian-language academics stems from political divisions from the time of British and Romanov imperial ambitions during the late nineteenth century, through Cold-War tensions spanning the twentieth.
https://doi.org/10.48352/uobxjah.00004267
Sotheby's, 2022
Entries for 6 folios from a Shahnama attributed to Qazvin, last quarter of the 16th century. Cont... more Entries for 6 folios from a Shahnama attributed to Qazvin, last quarter of the 16th century. Contributed to the auction 26 October 2022: Arts of the Islamic world & India: including fine rugs & carpets (London).
British Library Asian and African studies blog, 2022
https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2022/05/from-georgian-slave-to-safavid-master.html Siya... more <https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2022/05/from-georgian-slave-to-safavid-master.html>
Siyavush Beg Gurji (c.1536-1616), a brilliant but elusive maestro from the Safavid era, has intrigued scholars for half a decade. Some pages from a dispersed manuscript located in private German and Danish collections help widen our understanding of this individual, and the state of the arts in Iran at the turn of the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. Economics impact arts, and our conclusions are based on stylistic comparisons and the upsurge of sub-royal patrons who were commissioning richly illustrated manuscripts in parallel or in competition with princely ateliers during the second half of the sixteenth century.
Iranian/Persianate Subalterns in the Safavid Period: Their Role and Depiction. Recovering ‘Lost Voices’, 2022
Looking predominantly at painted works on paper spanning the sixteenth and early seventeenth cent... more Looking predominantly at painted works on paper spanning the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this article brings together single-page folios of kneeling warriors constrained in a wooden yoke. They have been collectively labelled "Turkoman Prisoners," but this label and other ethnolinguistic typologies are not suited to the original era of the works' production. Originally assembled into albums, it is argued that the depicted bound captives render troops of the Abulkhairid-Shibanid Uzbeks. These captives are depicted elsewhere in Safavid painting traditions that accompany historical chronicles, epic poetry, and murals on palace walls. As embodiments of the attitudes and antipathies of their creators, the article analyses the dual artistic and political function of this "subject" as a painted representation and as a person owing obedience. This paper uncovers how members of Safavid society fashioned their own sense of identity vis-à-vis their subalterns in Transoxiana and synthesises period textual and visual sources.
https://www.materialculture.nl/en/research/publications/loose-pages-and-lacquer-covers
Scholarship on Persianate painting has overlooked sixteenth-century Mawarannahr manuscript arts ... more Scholarship on Persianate painting has overlooked sixteenth-century Mawarannahr manuscript arts of the Shaybanid Uzbeks, a Turkish and Mongol tribal confederation that occupied present-day Central Asia. Art historical research has relegated the Shaybanid realm and its arts to a peripheral position always in relation to Safavid Iran that is perceived as its enemy, but this paper shifts the Shaybanids from a marginal position to become the center of a focused study. Prior research created the category “Bukharan School” to label certain single-page specimens and to privilege subject matter with romantic themes at the expense of others. These readings have ignored the wider array of materials, subjects, and styles coming out of multiple centers at the same time.
This study rectifies the skewed understanding of the manuscript arts in the realm of the Abulkhayrid branch of the Shaybanids (1500-1598) in the context of confrontations and encounters with --and also rapprochement and divergence between-- the Safavids. It looks at select “militant manuscripts” copied in the mid-sixteenth century that blend mythical heroes with historical figures. Whether it is an historical chronicle like the Shaybanināma or a collection of myths and legends within the Shahnāma, the artists insert Shaybanid leaders into the chronology of descendants of Chinggis Khan, noticeably disregarding the preceding Timurid dynasty whom the Shaybanids conquered. While the Safavids looked to the fifteenth-century Timurid dynasty to obtain legitimacy, the Shaybanids were pursuing connections to the more distant fourteenth-century Ilkhanid age and promoting a Mongol heritage derived from it. Taking an alternate position than that which has been published in articles on Safavid perceptions of Shaybanids to date, the Safavids were not so much averse to Shaybanid Turkification as to Shaybanid Mongolification.
Conference Presentations by Jaimee Comstock-Skipp
Turk amongst Tajiks: the Turkic Şehnâme manuscript in Tajikistan’s Institute of Oriental Studies... more Turk amongst Tajiks: the Turkic Şehnâme manuscript in Tajikistan’s Institute of Oriental Studies and Written Heritage, and the broader ‘Khurasan School’ of painting (1560-1600)
Online talk conducted in Persian at Ferdowsi University, Mashhad, Iran
26 September 2020, 5 Mehr 1399
instagram live: @literature.and.art.ispl
Lecture #5 in the Bilimkent series presented at the Abu Rayhon Beruni Institute, Tashkent, Uzbeki... more Lecture #5 in the Bilimkent series presented at the Abu Rayhon Beruni Institute, Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Spring 2020.
Whereas many scholars have focused on Shāhnāma manuscripts from the Iranian heartland, limited attention has been given to the political and artistic connections between the regions flanking it: Ottoman-controlled Anatolia and the Shaybānid Uzbeks who ruled over Transoxiana (Central Asia). Scholarship up to now has held that the artists of Shaybānid-controlled Transoxiana seldom illustrated copies of Firdausī’s Shāhnāma, thus the impact of Firdausī’s Shāhnāma epic on the Shaybānids has by far received the least attention. The focus of this paper is on an isolated copy of the epic located today in the Topkapi library (H.1488). It was originally produced in Bukhara in 1564/65 and was gifted in 1594 by the Shaybānid ruler ʿAbdallāh Khan Uzbek to the Ottoman Sultan Murād III. Presented in Istanbul by an embassy arriving from Bukhara, this paper will discuss both the art and politics at play in this offering. It will also present an overview of Shāhnāma productions from Shaybānid workshops that span the 16th century. By isolating copies of this one title and dwelling on the Topkapi copy (H.1488) in particular, I aim to show that interactions across the Ottoman realm and Transoxiana in the early modern period are richer than we have previously thought.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxe9de68ZAk&feature=youtu.be
Bogazici University Department of History and Asian Studies Center
Lecture presented at Netherlands Institute in Turkey
The presentation focuses on the Tavārīkh-i Guzīda-yi Nusratnāma (chronicle of select histories) i... more The presentation focuses on the Tavārīkh-i Guzīda-yi Nusratnāma (chronicle of select histories) illustrated manuscript located in the British Library, and the process of its production spanning several decades. It is an important prose Turkic-language chronicle consisting of composite textual sources. The work is held to be the first Abu'l-Khairid (commonly known as Shaybanid or Uzbek) historiographic composition and is indebted to older dynastic chronicles. Its illustrations depict Abu'l-Khairid rulers and their Mongol predecessors, and glorifies their descent traced through Chinggis Khan’s eldest son Jūchī. The pictorial schema combines a few fine paintings attributed to mid 16th-century Bukhara, with the majority invoking pictures from much earlier manuscripts from the Ilkhanid and Timurid dynasties. The discussion first overviews the text, then analyzes the single illustrated copy held in London, and explains the art’s stylistic archaism that is the key to comprehending its visual program.
The appropriation of cultural forms from select dynasties to secure political legitimacy is taking place in Central Asia today in light of independence from the Soviet Union. The nations of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan are harnessing Abu'l-Khairid artistic heritage for present politicizing, legitimizing, and nationalizing aims. This underscores the importance of teasing out cross-cultural and transregional factors at play in the 16th century, and I shall do so through examining the illustrated historical chronicle that is of great significance to the countries of Central Asia.
The Central Asian Manuscript Heritage in Cambridge University’s Collections, Part Two, The Cultural Legacy of Uzbekistan series vol. LXXIII (Tashkent: Silk Road Media, 2024)., 2024
In-depth analysis of a Shāhnāma held in the Ancient India and Iran Trust in Cambridge (AIIT ms. P... more In-depth analysis of a Shāhnāma held in the Ancient India and Iran Trust in Cambridge (AIIT ms. Pers. 2.01 BD), touching on manuscript production in Khurasan and Transoxiana circa late 16th -- early 17th centuries.
International Institute for Asian Studies, The Newsletter No. 95, 2023
Introduction to the manuscript arts of the Abu’l-Khayrid (Shaybanid) dynasty, overview of the per... more Introduction to the manuscript arts of the Abu’l-Khayrid (Shaybanid) dynasty, overview of the periodization of these materials, and summary of the scholarship on them to date.
Published by the International Institute for Asian Studies, in The Newsletter No. 95 (Summer 2023): pp. 28-29. https://www.iias.asia/the-newsletter
Memory and Commemoration across Central Asia, 2023
Published in Memory and Commemoration across Central Asia, eds. Gabrielle van den Berg and Elena ... more Published in Memory and Commemoration across Central Asia, eds. Gabrielle van den Berg and Elena Paskaleva, 53-89 (Leiden: Brill, 2023).
This article examines a Turkic-language Shahnama manuscript housed in the Center of Written Heritage at the National Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan. It identifies its text as Âmidî’s translation of Firdausi’s work which was a popular version in the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. Analysis of its unfinished illustrations compares them to other productions attributed to Khurasan in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, and narrows the scope to the last decade and a half. This refined provenance suggests that the visual schema to the Shahnama manuscript located in Tajikistan was added during the period in which the Abu’l-Khairid Shibanids conquered the Safavids and took over eastern Iran between 1588–1598. How the object migrated from the Ottoman sphere to Transoxiana cannot be proven. The presented case study instead intimates the Uzbek–Ottoman exchanges in arts of the book contributing to the object’s production, and the state of manuscripts manufactured in late-century Herat and broader Khurasan. Despite the political turmoil, artistic talent from multiple centres congregated in this region in which staff, manuscripts, and their intended buyers crossed multiple dynastic lines.
in ‘A Historiography of Persian Art: Past, Present and Future’, Journal of Art Historiography, Number 28 (June 2023), guest-edited by Yuka Kadoi and András Barati. https://arthistoriography.wordpress.com/28-jun23/, 2023
In treating illustrated Persian-language manuscript arts from the medieval and early-modern perio... more In treating illustrated Persian-language manuscript arts from the medieval and early-modern periods, dynasties have come to be associated with Iran and their art forms labelled ‘Persian’ and ‘Iranian’. Materials from sixteenth-century Central Asia— implying the Abu’l-Khairid dynasty (commonly called Shaybanid Uzbek, in power 1500—1599)—challenge this classification. Scholarship has witnessed intellectual fissures dividing Iran from Central Asia, and Russian-speaking and Anglophone scholars from each other. These are not pedantic trivialities, but deliberate intrusions of national and political agendas into art historical analyses. The geographic split partitioning Iran from Central Asia has its origins in the historical battles waged between the Safavids and Abu’l-Khairids across the sixteenth century, while the linguistic and ideological rift separating English- and Russian-language academics stems from political divisions from the time of British and Romanov imperial ambitions during the late nineteenth century, through Cold-War tensions spanning the twentieth.
https://doi.org/10.48352/uobxjah.00004267
Sotheby's, 2022
Entries for 6 folios from a Shahnama attributed to Qazvin, last quarter of the 16th century. Cont... more Entries for 6 folios from a Shahnama attributed to Qazvin, last quarter of the 16th century. Contributed to the auction 26 October 2022: Arts of the Islamic world & India: including fine rugs & carpets (London).
British Library Asian and African studies blog, 2022
https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2022/05/from-georgian-slave-to-safavid-master.html Siya... more <https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2022/05/from-georgian-slave-to-safavid-master.html>
Siyavush Beg Gurji (c.1536-1616), a brilliant but elusive maestro from the Safavid era, has intrigued scholars for half a decade. Some pages from a dispersed manuscript located in private German and Danish collections help widen our understanding of this individual, and the state of the arts in Iran at the turn of the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. Economics impact arts, and our conclusions are based on stylistic comparisons and the upsurge of sub-royal patrons who were commissioning richly illustrated manuscripts in parallel or in competition with princely ateliers during the second half of the sixteenth century.
Iranian/Persianate Subalterns in the Safavid Period: Their Role and Depiction. Recovering ‘Lost Voices’, 2022
Looking predominantly at painted works on paper spanning the sixteenth and early seventeenth cent... more Looking predominantly at painted works on paper spanning the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this article brings together single-page folios of kneeling warriors constrained in a wooden yoke. They have been collectively labelled "Turkoman Prisoners," but this label and other ethnolinguistic typologies are not suited to the original era of the works' production. Originally assembled into albums, it is argued that the depicted bound captives render troops of the Abulkhairid-Shibanid Uzbeks. These captives are depicted elsewhere in Safavid painting traditions that accompany historical chronicles, epic poetry, and murals on palace walls. As embodiments of the attitudes and antipathies of their creators, the article analyses the dual artistic and political function of this "subject" as a painted representation and as a person owing obedience. This paper uncovers how members of Safavid society fashioned their own sense of identity vis-à-vis their subalterns in Transoxiana and synthesises period textual and visual sources.
https://www.materialculture.nl/en/research/publications/loose-pages-and-lacquer-covers
Scholarship on Persianate painting has overlooked sixteenth-century Mawarannahr manuscript arts ... more Scholarship on Persianate painting has overlooked sixteenth-century Mawarannahr manuscript arts of the Shaybanid Uzbeks, a Turkish and Mongol tribal confederation that occupied present-day Central Asia. Art historical research has relegated the Shaybanid realm and its arts to a peripheral position always in relation to Safavid Iran that is perceived as its enemy, but this paper shifts the Shaybanids from a marginal position to become the center of a focused study. Prior research created the category “Bukharan School” to label certain single-page specimens and to privilege subject matter with romantic themes at the expense of others. These readings have ignored the wider array of materials, subjects, and styles coming out of multiple centers at the same time.
This study rectifies the skewed understanding of the manuscript arts in the realm of the Abulkhayrid branch of the Shaybanids (1500-1598) in the context of confrontations and encounters with --and also rapprochement and divergence between-- the Safavids. It looks at select “militant manuscripts” copied in the mid-sixteenth century that blend mythical heroes with historical figures. Whether it is an historical chronicle like the Shaybanināma or a collection of myths and legends within the Shahnāma, the artists insert Shaybanid leaders into the chronology of descendants of Chinggis Khan, noticeably disregarding the preceding Timurid dynasty whom the Shaybanids conquered. While the Safavids looked to the fifteenth-century Timurid dynasty to obtain legitimacy, the Shaybanids were pursuing connections to the more distant fourteenth-century Ilkhanid age and promoting a Mongol heritage derived from it. Taking an alternate position than that which has been published in articles on Safavid perceptions of Shaybanids to date, the Safavids were not so much averse to Shaybanid Turkification as to Shaybanid Mongolification.
Turk amongst Tajiks: the Turkic Şehnâme manuscript in Tajikistan’s Institute of Oriental Studies... more Turk amongst Tajiks: the Turkic Şehnâme manuscript in Tajikistan’s Institute of Oriental Studies and Written Heritage, and the broader ‘Khurasan School’ of painting (1560-1600)
Online talk conducted in Persian at Ferdowsi University, Mashhad, Iran
26 September 2020, 5 Mehr 1399
instagram live: @literature.and.art.ispl
Lecture #5 in the Bilimkent series presented at the Abu Rayhon Beruni Institute, Tashkent, Uzbeki... more Lecture #5 in the Bilimkent series presented at the Abu Rayhon Beruni Institute, Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Spring 2020.
Whereas many scholars have focused on Shāhnāma manuscripts from the Iranian heartland, limited attention has been given to the political and artistic connections between the regions flanking it: Ottoman-controlled Anatolia and the Shaybānid Uzbeks who ruled over Transoxiana (Central Asia). Scholarship up to now has held that the artists of Shaybānid-controlled Transoxiana seldom illustrated copies of Firdausī’s Shāhnāma, thus the impact of Firdausī’s Shāhnāma epic on the Shaybānids has by far received the least attention. The focus of this paper is on an isolated copy of the epic located today in the Topkapi library (H.1488). It was originally produced in Bukhara in 1564/65 and was gifted in 1594 by the Shaybānid ruler ʿAbdallāh Khan Uzbek to the Ottoman Sultan Murād III. Presented in Istanbul by an embassy arriving from Bukhara, this paper will discuss both the art and politics at play in this offering. It will also present an overview of Shāhnāma productions from Shaybānid workshops that span the 16th century. By isolating copies of this one title and dwelling on the Topkapi copy (H.1488) in particular, I aim to show that interactions across the Ottoman realm and Transoxiana in the early modern period are richer than we have previously thought.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxe9de68ZAk&feature=youtu.be
Bogazici University Department of History and Asian Studies Center
Lecture presented at Netherlands Institute in Turkey
Looking predominantly at drawn and painted materials spanning the 16th through early-17th centuri... more Looking predominantly at drawn and painted materials spanning the 16th through early-17th centuries, this paper brings together multiple iterations of the “Turkoman Prisoner” subject housed in libraries, museums, and private collections across the world to analyze them as both a complete genre and as embodiments of period attitudes and antipathies at the time of their creation. The author’s holistic approach synthesizes textual and visual sources to argue that Shībānīd Uzbek troops—as depicted in the Safavid manuscript traditions of historical chronicles, epic poetry, and large-scale wall paintings—and the Bound Captives confined within the margins of single-page album folios are one and the same.
It critiques the existing scholarship on these prisoners who are assumed to be non-Safavid, but these readings are inflected by the ethnolinguistic typologies of the scholars’ own age and based on perceived divisions between Persian and Turkic realms that are not historically accurate. This paper serves as a corrective to uncover how Safavid society might have interpreted the depicted visual subjects and fashioned its own sense of identity vis-a-vis Shībānīd subalterns.
https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/1_76oj318c
The presentation focuses on the Tavārīkh-i Guzīda-yi Nusratnāma (chronicle of select histories) i... more The presentation focuses on the Tavārīkh-i Guzīda-yi Nusratnāma (chronicle of select histories) illustrated manuscript located in the British Library, and the process of its production spanning several decades. It is an important prose Turkic-language chronicle consisting of composite textual sources. The work is held to be the first Abu'l-Khairid (commonly known as Shaybanid or Uzbek) historiographic composition and is indebted to older dynastic chronicles. Its illustrations depict Abu'l-Khairid rulers and their Mongol predecessors, and glorifies their descent traced through Chinggis Khan’s eldest son Jūchī. The pictorial schema combines a few fine paintings attributed to mid 16th-century Bukhara, with the majority invoking pictures from much earlier manuscripts from the Ilkhanid and Timurid dynasties. The discussion first overviews the text, then analyzes the single illustrated copy held in London, and explains the art’s stylistic archaism that is the key to comprehending its visual program.
The appropriation of cultural forms from select dynasties to secure political legitimacy is taking place in Central Asia today in light of independence from the Soviet Union. The nations of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan are harnessing Abu'l-Khairid artistic heritage for present politicizing, legitimizing, and nationalizing aims. This underscores the importance of teasing out cross-cultural and transregional factors at play in the 16th century, and I shall do so through examining the illustrated historical chronicle that is of great significance to the countries of Central Asia.
This paper provides an overview of illustrated manuscripts produced in Central Asia when the regi... more This paper provides an overview of illustrated manuscripts produced in Central Asia when the region was administered by the Abū’l-Khairid Uzbeks, a group more commonly known as the Shaybanids (1500—1598). The group’s administrative and artistic strength was short-lived, but significant. Focusing on their arts and politics mostly centered in Bukhara (present-day Uzbekistan), Abū’l-Khairid manuscripts and their use in economic and diplomatic relations are a means to examine deeper issues of sectarian coexistence and conflict, voluntary and forced migrations of artisans, and ethno-linguistic nationalities that continue to be negotiated in Muslim-majority countries. Designations of Persian and Turkish-speaking groups, and declarations of Sunni and Shi’ite adherence in faith, have delineated and dominated identities beginning in the 16th century. Moreover, current Central Asian states are harnessing Abū’l-Khairid artistic heritage for present political legitimacy and national aims, which underscores the importance of teasing out the cross-cultural and transregional factors shaping the original traditions.
Arts in Isolation Series-podcast, 2020
About this Podcast: Jaimee Comstock-Skipp takes us on a magical journey to learn more about the e... more About this Podcast:
Jaimee Comstock-Skipp takes us on a magical journey to learn more about the epic poem of Iran: Firdausī’s Shāhnāma – a tale that distills love, treason, revenge, and the struggle for power.
She reflects on the book’s role as a guide for good leadership, and looks at its illustrations for insights into the many facets of a successful leader in the Persian-speaking world, including Central Asia. What can world leaders learn from it today?
Jaimee holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley in Near Eastern studies with a speciality in Arabic and Islamic civilizations (2009). She also holds an MA from the Williams College Graduate Programme in the History of Art (2012) and a second MA from The Courtauld Institute of Art in London (2015), where she studied book arts of the Mongol through Safavid periods.
She is currently a PhD candidate affiliated with Leiden University working on a dissertation related to Shaybānid productions of Firdausī’s Shāhnāma epic from 16th to 17th-century Central Asia. She has received numerous research awards, including a Barakat Trust grant in 2019 and has published widely about the Uzbeks, heroes and heroism, and identity.
This podcast is part of Converging Paths and Arts In Isolation, a partnership with Asia House, kindly supported by the Altajir Trust, and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture’s Education Programme.
Listen online to this new podcast and enjoy other exciting content through the Arts in Isolation Series.