One of the first things I did when I arrived at Amherst College was to ask the staff @meadartmuseum to see everything in the collection from South Asia. They kindly obliged & showed me lots of cool stuff, but one thing in particular made my jaw drop. A short thread... Here it is--AC 1963.4--a painting on paper measuring around 42.5 x 31.7 cm. Looks like just a bunch of guys standing around a white building. BUT, the Persian inscription above IDs the scene as the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb visiting the shrine of Mu'in al-Din Chishti in Ajmer!

Today the students in my Indian art/arch course and I will be eating pongal and chutney together (remotely) as we learn about the Brihadesvara Temple in Thanjavur. I've never incorporated recipes/food into art history courses before, a habit I'm now rethinking. Mine turned out "OK." Can't compete with the pongal served at Surguru in Pondicherry (my pic from years ago below) or really most pongals, but it does the job!

As this brilliant thread makes clear, that evopsych paper tracks "trustworthiness displays" in a database of portraits of WHITE Euro elites, using an algorithm engineered to detect _contemporary bias_ in the perception of character of WHITE people...

https://twitter.com/yet_so_far/status/1309475976376725504

In other words, the study is not only projecting presentist bias towards WHITE displays of "trustworthiness" (wtf that means) onto the past, it's doing so under the cover that these biases are natural & universal, a conclusion that studies the paper cites don't even support...

* stares in art historian * nature.com/articles/s4146… It hadn't dawned on me till now that I work on cognitive fossils with low computed trustworthiness

Christie's recent sale of a 15th-c. Qur'an ms. lacking transparent info. about its provenance has generated much debate about the legal/ethical dimensions of the sale & trafficking of mss. This is a *thread* about why the preservation of manuscripts & books even matters. 1/n Firstly, on the legal/ethical issues re the sale/export/import of mss., int'l agreements and nat'l laws re protection of mss., & why transparency re the provenance of mss. matters as much as that of excavated materials see the brilliant @stephenniem here:

https://twitter.com/stephenniem/status/1277052227644010497?s=20

I've decided to revamp my course offerings for fall to teach an entirely new course on digital methods for art history. I've been wanting to do this for a while, and the need for such a course seems all the more pressing now. Three of four of our thesis writers this year... ...drew upon DH methods. Students are clearly eager to employ these approaches! I've benefited from convos with colleagues who have taught / plan to teach DAH courses, esp. Sarah Laursen, Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis, @alexbrey, @marselykehoe, & will be seeking advice from others.

A tale of false cognates: reflecting on the time about a year ago when, on a tour of Bene Israel/Jewish villages near Bombay, my nephew asked our guide why so many of the community's surnames comprise the village name & the -kar suffix. 1/x His response was that this comes from the Hebrew איכר 'ikar,' meaning farmer, so someone named Penkar is a farmer from the village of Pen. But the '-kar' suffix is in fact Indic in origin. It's used in Marathi, e.g., and simply indicates where someone/something is from. 2/x

Puzzle me this: the Philadelphia Museum of Art has one of the world’s best collections of South Asian Art, yet of the 100s of PMA Instagram posts from the last yr, only 10 showcase South Asian art (2 of these are repeats of the same work). The last one is from Nov. 3. The collection also includes important works by modern & contemporary artists from South Asia—none have been featured on Instagram in the past year, but mod/con Euro/N.American works have been & in large numbers.

So, this tweet blew up in a way that I couldn’t have imagined. Let me clarify that the label’s grimness is, for me, of an intellectual, not an emotional nature. (I do not psychoanalyze museum labels nor do I endorse joking about anyone’s mental state.) The label’s author 1/x

https://twitter.com/Yael_Rice/status/1218909404579422210

...points to a very real & important issue that all curators must contend with, which is the way that museums transform artifacts’ functions from used/lived into aestheticized objects. My pat commentary, then, was really intended to point to the fact that museum objects 2/x

Just finished listening to an ep of @TheWonderHouse, a new podcast from @SushmaJansari on approaches to decolonizing museums. Can not recommend more highly enough! In this ep, @SushmaJansari speaks with Sara Wajid, of the Museum of London: thoughtful, insightful, and inspiring. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the…

I always _dread_ reading course evaluations, but the evals for my 'Arts of the Islamic Book,' which I taught at @AmherstCollege last semester, are overwhelmingly positive: thoughtful, engaged, and enthusiastic. I love it when my students fall in love with these amazing materials! @AmherstCollege I took a risk this time around & incorporated more hands-on (doing/making) and DH assignments, and that seems to have resonated. I'm happy to share my course materials (syllabus, assignments) with anyone who's interested.

Learned yesterday about Edward Tregear, a British-born New Zealander who developed a theory about the Aryan (i.e. Indo-European) origins of the Maori language, published as _The Aryan Maori_ in 1885. archive.org/details/aryanm… Based on his linguistic analysis of the language, Tregear proposed that the Maori were part of the wave of Indo-European migrations from the geographic area north of the Caspian Sea that occurred between 4000-1500 BC.

Inspired by @wynkenhimself's 'making a quarto' exercise, I had the students in my 'Islamic Arts of the Book' course make quaternions (quires of 16 pages) with title pages, colophons, and catchwords, using a text of their choice, and the results are amazing @wynkenhimself FYI, here's a link to the 'making a quarto' exercise: sarahwerner.net/FolgerBooks/wp…

There's a scene in the new Name of the Rose series where William of Baskerville stumbles upon an 'original' ms copy of Alhazen's/Ibn al-Haytham's Book of Optics/Kitab al-Manazir, composed c. 1011–21? Spoiler alert: That isn't the Kitab al-Manazir. Another spoiler: The autograph copy of the Kitab al-Manazir isn't known to be extant. The oldest known ms., copied by Ibn al-Haytham's son-in-law, is dated 476 H. (1083-4 AD) and resides in the Süleymaniye Library, Istanbul.

I'm pretty psyched about the diversity of intro art history courses Amherst College will be offering in fall. Amherst's a small institution, and our dept. has only 7 full-time art historians on faculty. Conspicuously missing are early modern Europe (our specialist is on leave) and medieval Europe & early modern-1900 Americas, the result of recent retirements that have yet to be replaced.

This defense of cultural repatriation doesn’t take into account that some of the very cultural artifacts that the author says should be in Indian (no less, public) hands are part of a (Muslim) heritage that many Indians virulently disavow nytimes.com/2019/06/27/opi… Yes, let’s repatriate objects made for and by South Asian Muslims to the custody of a government that is actively & blatantly Islam’s architectural heritage in India.

Gülru Necipoğlu's takedown of Hans Belting's _Florence & Baghdad_ is simultaneously brutal, systematic, & restrained. I don't think I could exercise such control responding to statements like this: As she explains in her 2015 "The Scrutinizing Gaze," Belting's whole argument hinges on the idea that pre-modern Islamic visual culture was basically just script and geometry. He draws from her important work on architectural scrolls to develop his thesis, however...

Christoph Büchel’s _Barca Nostra_, "a monument to contemporary migration" cost €33 million to execute, a figure that could have funded "two clinics...for victims of torture and sexual violence, including free medication — for about 10 years." madamasr.com/en/2019/05/29/… Jeanne-Claude and Christo's various wrapping projects also ran in the millions, but they raised the money entirely on their own, w/out public or private sponsorship.

I made the trip out to Burhanpur 2 weeks ago, w/ highs hovering around 108F/42C, so you wouldn't have to. Located in Madhya Pradesh, it was a major political/commercial center (esp. for textiles) till the 18C. Today, looms still grind away and lonely-looking donkeys roam freely. There are a number of important monuments in Burhanpur, such as a Faruqui jami' mosque, founded 1588, bearing a bilingual (Arabic & Sanskrit) inscription in the northernmost niche along its qibla wall. The Mughals added a Persian epigraph to mark their 1601 conquest of the city

LOL @ this email from a UK rare books dealer featuring "a Fine Persian manuscript looted from the Qaisarbagh in 1858," meaning that the book's theft by a British officer from the Nawab of Awadh's personal library in the aftermath of the sepoy revolt of 1857 is a selling point. Truth be told there are some pretty cool things in the catalogue that I'd be very happy to own...

Amazing opportunity at an incredible institution. But I have a hard time seeing how anyone who isn't supported financially by a partner or family could swing this salary. I certainly couldn't.

https://twitter.com/SaqibBaburi/status/1132743134662807552

I don't besmirch whomever ends up taking this job. Like I said: this is a phenomenal opportunity to work with a to-die-for collection. But! I feel it's important to point out that curatorial salaries like this one function as another (albeit unintentional) form of gate-keeping...