Peyvand Firouzeh, Intimacies of Global Sufism: Ne‘matullahi Shrines and Material Culture Between Iran and India
- CIS Public Talks
- May 14, 2026 - 17:00
- Room 10,Faculty of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, Sidgwick Ave, Cambridge
The talk is based on a recently published monograph. From the fifteenth century onwards, followers of the Sufi poet Shah Ne‘matullah Vali (d. 1431) navigated land and sea routes through Central Asia, Iran, and India. Along the way, they built shrines whose poetry, spatial configuration, and materiality created intimate religious spaces that engaged local audiences, invoked distant places, and brought together pilgrims, itinerant artists, merchants, and courtiers from many regions.
Peyvand Firouzeh is Assistant Professor of Islamic Art at the University of Cambridge and author of Intimacies of Global Sufism: Ne’matullahi Shrines and Material Culture Between Iran and India (Indiana University Press, November 2025). She studies the art, architecture, and material cultures of the early modern Islamic world, particularly the material cultures of Sufism and artistic connections between Iran and India and in the broader Indian Ocean world. Before joining Cambridge, she was Senior Lecturer in Islamic Art at the University of Sydney and held research and curatorial positions with the Getty Research Institute, Australian Research Council, American Council of Learned Societies, Kunsthistorisches Institut (Max-Planck-Institut) in Florence, the Forum Transregionale Studien and Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin, and the British Museum.