Amy Landau is Assistant Curator of Islamic Art and Manuscripts. 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 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 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 explores on shifts in the visual culture of early modern Iran, with particular emphasis on interaction between Safavid Persia and Europe and the Armenian merchant community of New Julfa. Currently, she is working on an international loan exhibition on the art of the Islamic manuscript. Landau’s other exhibitions include
Poetry and Prayer;
the Art of the Writing Instrument from Paris to Persia (2011);
Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (2011-2012); and
Cairo’s Ben Ezra Synagogue (2012). 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.
