Amy Landau
Assistant Curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books, The Walters Art Museum
Amy Landau oversees the Islamic and Armenian codices and single pages. Landau received her PhD from the Department of Islamic Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford, in 2007, with a thesis entitled "Farangi-sazi at Isfahan: the Court Painter Muhammad Zaman, the Armenians of New Julfa and Shah Sulayman (1666-1694)". She was formerly the Wallis Annenberg Curatorial Fellowship, in the Art of the Middle East, at the Los Angeles County Museum and Research Assistant to the Chief Curator at the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. Landau has held fellowships at the Warburg Institute (University of London), the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, and she was a visiting scholar at the Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA. She was awarded grants from the British Institute for Persian Studies, the American Institute of Iranian Studies and the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) for research in Iran and Armenia. Landau's work focuses on shifts in the visual culture of early modern Iran, with particular emphasis on the development and significance of hybrid artistic idioms resulting from transimperial exchange, and she has a special interest in the art of the Armenian merchant community of New Julfa (Iran). Her recent publications include 'Adaptation of Religious Iconography in Seventeenth-Century Iran: the Case of Bethlehem Church', in W. Floor and E. Herzig (eds.), Iran and the World in the Safavid Age, London (in press) and 'From Poet to Painter: Allegory and Metaphor in a Seventeenth-Century Persian Painting by Muhammad Zaman, Master of Farangi-Sazi (the Europeanized Style)', in Muqarnas. An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World, volume 28, due out in 2011. Landau is working on a book project tentatively entitled Global Visions in Early Modern Iran: Art and Culture during the Epoch of Shah Sulayman (1666-1694).