Nur-ud-Din Muhammad Salim, known by his imperial name Jahangir, was the fourth Mughal Emperor, who ruled from 1605 till his death in 1627.
Mirza Shahab-ud-Din Muhammad Khurram, also known as Shah Jahan I, was the fifth Mughal emperor, reigning from 1628 until 1658. During his reign, the Mughals reached the peak of their architectural and cultural achievements.
Samarra is a city in Iraq. It stands on the east bank of the Tigris in the Saladin Governorate, 125 kilometers (78 mi) north of Baghdad. The modern city of Samarra was founded in 836 by the Abbasid caliph al-Mu'tasim as a new administrative capital and military base. In 2003 the city had an estimated population of 348,700. During the Iraqi Civil War, Samarra was in the "Sunni Triangle" of resistance.
The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery is an art museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., focusing on Asian art. The Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art together form the National Museum of Asian Art in the United States. The Freer and Sackler galleries house the largest Asian art research library in the country.
Ding are prehistoric and ancient Chinese cauldrons standing upon legs with a lid and two fancy facing handles. They are one of the most important shapes used in Chinese ritual bronzes. They were made in two shapes: round vessels with three legs and rectangular ones with four, the latter often called fāng dǐng "square ding (方鼎. They were used for cooking, storage, and ritual offerings to the gods or to ancestors.
The Freer Gallery of Art is an art museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. focusing on Asian art. The Freer and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery together form the National Museum of Asian Art in the United States. The Freer and Sackler galleries house the largest Asian art research library in the country and contain art from East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Islamic world, the ancient Near East, and ancient Egypt, as well as a significant collection of American art.
Sir David Nicholas Cannadine is a British author and historian who specialises in modern history, Britain and the history of business and philanthropy. He is currently the Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University, a visiting professor of history at Oxford University, and the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He was president of the British Academy between 2017 and 2021, the UK's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. He also serves as the chairman of the trustees of the National Portrait Gallery in London and vice-chair of the editorial board of Past & Present.
Brian Murray Fagan is a British author of popular archaeology books and a professor emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Jonathan Mark Kenoyer is an American archaeologist and George F. Dales Jr. & Barbara A. Dales Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He earned his Bachelor of Arts, Master's, and Doctorate degrees at the University of California, Berkeley, finishing in 1983. Kenoyer is president of the Society of Bead Researchers.
Arthur Mitchell Sackler was an American psychiatrist and marketer of pharmaceuticals whose fortune originated in medical advertising and trade publications. He was also an art collector. He was one of the three patriarchs of the controversial Sackler family pharmaceutical dynasty.
Hugh Nigel Kennedy is a British medievalist and academic. He specialises in the history of the early Islamic Middle East, Muslim Iberia and the Crusades. From 1997 to 2007, he was Professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of St Andrews. Since 2007, he has been Professor of Arabic at SOAS, University of London.
Ebba Koch is an Austrian art and architectural historian, who defines and discusses cultural issues of interest to political, social and economic historians. Presently she is a professor at the Institute of Art History in Vienna, Austria and a senior researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She completed her doctorate in philosophy and her Habilitation at Vienna University.
Glenn David Lowry is an American art historian and director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City since 1995. His initiatives there include strengthening MoMA's contemporary art program, significantly developing the collection holdings in all media, and guiding two major campaigns for the renovation, expansion, and endowment of the museum. He has lectured and written extensively in support of contemporary art and artists and the role of museums in society, among other topics.
Bruce Elliot Tapper is a social anthropologist, journalist, writer, and editor. He has published numerous articles on Telugu society and culture in Andhra Pradesh, and shadow puppets as a form of entertainment. He lived in a small village called Aripaka, close to Visakhapatnam, from 1970-72 to research the social structure and religious customs of the farmers and various other occupational communities in the village.
Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room is a work of interior decorative art created by James McNeill Whistler and Thomas Jeckyll, translocated to the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Whistler painted the paneled room in a unified palette of blue-greens with over-glazing and metallic gold leaf. Painted between 1876 and 1877, it now is considered one of the greatest surviving Aesthetic interiors, and best examples of the Anglo-Japanese style.
Nader El-Bizri is the Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Sharjah. He served before as a tenured longstanding full Professor of philosophy and civilization studies at the American University of Beirut, where he also acted as an Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and as the Director of the General Education program. El-Bizri specializes in phenomenology, Islamic science and philosophy, and architectural theory. He is the author or editor of several books, including The Phenomenological Quest between Avicenna and Heidegger (2000).
Mortimer David Sackler was an American-born psychiatrist and entrepreneur who was a co-owner, with his brothers Arthur and Raymond, of Purdue Pharma. During his lifetime, Sackler's philanthropy included donations to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate Gallery, the Royal College of Art, the Louvre and Berlin's Jewish Museum.
Library of Arabic Literature offers Arabic editions and English translations of significant works of Arabic literature from the seventh to nineteenth centuries. "Our aim is to revive and reintroduce classic Arabic literature to a whole new generation of Arabs and non-Arabs, and make it more accessible and readable to everyone." "Currently very few texts from this great corpus of literature have been translated." The books are edited and translated by distinguished Arabic and Islamic scholars from around the world, and are made available in hardcover parallel-text format with Arabic and English on facing pages, as English-only paperbacks, and as downloadable Arabic editions. For some texts, the series also publishes separate scholarly editions with full critical apparatus. Genres include poetry and prose, fiction, religion, philosophy, law, science, history, and travel writing. The series is published by NYU Press and supported by a grant from the New York University Abu Dhabi Institute.
Vidya Dehejia is a retired academic and the Barbara Stoler Miller Professor Emerita of Indian and South Asian Art at Columbia University. She has published 24 books and numerous academic papers on the art of South Asia, and has curated many exhibitions on the same theme.
Massumeh Farhad is an Iranian-born American curator, art historian, and author. She is the Chief Curator and Curator of Islamic Art at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Asian Art. She is known for her work with Persian 17th-century manuscripts.
