Dr Peyvand Firouzeh

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Pembroke College
  • Assistant Professor of Islamic Art
  • Director of MPhil in the Global History of Art and Architecture
  • Fellow of Pembroke College
Available to supervise doctoral students
Dr Peyvand Firouzeh

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About

I am a trained architect and historian of medieval and early modern art and architecture in the Islamic world, with a focus on cultural exchange across the Indian Ocean. Before joining Cambridge, I was Senior Lecturer in Islamic Art at the University of Sydney. I have 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. I received my MPhil and PhD in History of Art and Architecture and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from University of Cambridge, and an MA and BA in Architecture from University of Art in Tehran.

Research

My research interests span Sufi material cultures, the spatial poetics of epigraphy, modes of replication that traverse architecture, painting, and material culture, and the migration of objects and artistic networks in the Persianate and Indian Ocean worlds. My recent monograph Intimacies of Global Sufism: Ne'matullahi Shrines and Material Culture between Iran and India (Indiana University Press, November 2025), addresses the relationship between mysticism, materiality, and mobility. Focusing on a transcultural network of significant but hitherto understudied Sufi shrines in Iran and India, the book uses the concept of "intimacy" to redraw the boundaries between small devotional spaces and monumental structures, as well as between local and global histories of faith and art making. Intimacies of Global Sufism is the recipient of College Art Association’s Millard Meiss Publication Fund, The Barakat Trust Publication Award, The New Foundation for Art History Publication Subvention Grant, and the Persian Heritage Foundation Publication Grant. My articles and book chapters have dealt with the replication of sacred sites in the Islamic world, the relationship between devotional textiles and architecture, epigraphy and Sufi material culture, itinerant artists, manuscripts, and metalwork between Iran and India as well as Renaissance Italy and the Islamic world. My writings have appeared in The Art Bulletin, South Asian Studies, I Tatti Studies, Iran, and several edited volumes.

I am currently working on two book projects. The first, for which I received a Discovery Early Career Research Award from the Australian Research Council in 2023, focuses on monuments in fifteenth-century India that claim a relationship with the Ka‘ba in Mecca, the most significant site of pilgrimage for Muslims. The second project, for which I received a Getty Scholar Grant (2022-23), explores the real and imagined migrations of the coco-de-mer nutshell, native to the islands of Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, with a focus on their use as Sufis' begging bowls.

I am co-editor of A Cultural History of Asian Art from 1500 to 1800 with Stephen Whiteman (Courtauld Institute of Art) which is under contract with Bloomsbury as part of a broader project on cultural histories of Asian art led by the Courtauld.

Publications

Selected publications

Intimacies of Global Sufism: The Neʿmatullahi Shrines and Material Culture between Iran and India (Indiana University Press, 2025) Book Firouzeh, P. 'Distance and Metaphor: Replicating the Kaʿba in Deccan India.’ The Art Bulletin 108, no.1 (2026): 90-123. Journal article Firouzeh, P. 'Translating Desire: Safavid and Ottoman Daggers in the Venetian Imaginary,’ co-authored with Robert Brennan, I Tatti Studies 28, no.1 (2025): 81-111. Journal article Firouzeh, P. ‘Pushesh-e qabr (tomb cover),’ catalogue essay in The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin: An Online Exhibition of an Iranian Shrine, directed and edited by Keelan Overton, 33 Arches, 2024. Host: Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online Firouzeh, P. ‘Mahmūd Shihāb al-Dīn Bahmanī,’ in Encyclopaedia of Islam THREE, edited by: Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Devin J. Stewart, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2023, 61-65 Journal article Firouzeh, P. ‘Sufi lodge,’ Handbook of Sufi Studies: Sufi Institutions, edited by Alexandre Papas, Brill, 2021, 157-173 Chapter Firouzeh, P. ‘Dynastic Self-fashioning and the Arts of the Pen: Sufi and calligraphy networks between fifteenth-century Shiraz and Bidar,’ in Iran and the Deccan Chapter Firouzeh, P. ‘Convention and Reinvention: The British Library Shahnama of 1438,’ Iran 57 (2019): 49-70 Journal article Firouzeh, P. ‘Between the Spiritual and Material: The Niʿmatullahi Sufi Order’s Institutionalisation and Architectural Patronage in the 9th/15th Century,’ in Shi’i Islam and Sufism: Classical Views and Modern Perspectives, edited by Denis Herman and Mathieu Terrier. L Chapter Firouzeh, P. ‘Sacred Kingship in the Garden of Poetry: Ahmad Shah Bahmani’s tomb in Bidar (India),’ South Asian Studies 31, special issue: Divine Intervention: The Role of Religion and Ritual in South Asian visual culture, edited by Rachel Parikh and Imma Ramos (2015) Journal article Firouzeh, P.

Teaching and supervision

Available to supervise doctoral students

Drawing on ten years of research, teaching, and museum experience, I teach on architecture, manuscripts, Sufi material culture, the relationship between textiles and space, and cross-cultural exchange across both the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean.  

I am committed to hands-on, object-based teaching that engages with urgent methodological questions in the field of Islamic and global art histories. I advocate for an art history that is both rigorously historical and deeply engaged with current social and political issues. Teaching in a field that is rethinking its canon, historiography, and museum collections with ever greater intensity, my pedagogical strategies embrace debates over the political entanglements of the field – from iconoclasm and Islamic extremism to Islamophobia and issues around cultural restitution.  

I have extensive experience in supervising MPhil and PhD students working on various aspects of Islamic art and architecture. I welcome graduate students interested in all aspects of Islamic art, architecture, and material cultures, but especially those planning to study Iran, South Asia, and more broadly, the Indian Ocean world in medieval and early modern times.