DVS Teaching Talk: Meredyth Winter

The Department of Visual Studies presents a virtual teaching talk for a tenure-stream position in Islamic Art & Architecture:

"Craft & Sustainability in the Medieval Islamic World: The Case of Textiles"
Dr. Meredyth Winter

December 3, 2020
11 am to 12 pm ET
Online via Zoom

Please contact the DVS Chair's Office via email for Meeting ID & Passcode.

Meredyth Winter is a historian of medieval Islamic art and material culture. Specializing in the late Abbasid period (ca.950-1250 CE), she studies sites and artworks that lie at the intersection of technological and artistic invention. Textiles and textile workers play a central role in much of her work: as the most portable of the luxury arts and the craft enlisting the largest labor force, they constitute invaluable evidence for understanding medieval making processes in all media. Meredyth’s dissertation Silks Withdrawn: A Re-contextualization of the Medieval Fragments from Rayy takes up the sole cache of medieval silks to be recovered from the Central Islamic lands and considers them as a corpus to understand their significance in the late Abbasid world. She traces the textiles through their making, use, and alteration, following their paths in public, courtly, and funerary spheres. She argues that their mediating role negotiated communal markers of identity and established an internal system of signification that would be mirrored in other media and that would lay the groundwork for artistic innovation under Abbasid, Buyid, and Seljuk rulers.