Dr Peyvand Firouzeh

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.

My research interests span Sufi material cultures, the spatial poetics of epigraphy, replication as an artistic and intellectual endeavour traversing 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. I am currently working on two new projects. The first, for which I received a Discovery Early Career Research Award from the Australian Research Council, 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 committed to hands-on, object-based teaching that engages with urgent methodological questions in the field of Islamic and global art histories. I believe in 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 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.