Congratulations to Xinyu Liang for being awarded the William A. Camfield Graduate Fellowship! As a Camfield Fellow, Xinyu will work in the next academic year at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston under the guidance of a professional museum curator in the Art of the Islamic Worlds department.
Xinyu's current research focuses on Islamic book art, Chinese Islamic art, and transcultural studies along the Silk Road in the Middle Ages.
Read more about Xinyu's thoughts on her upcoming fellowship:
"Working at the MFAH would provide me with extraordinary opportunities to access objects in multiple medias. There are many extensive refinement collections that I wish to study closely, such as the star tile from the Takht-i Sulayman, the folio 77v from the "Shahnama" of Shah Tahmasp, and the lacquer bookbinding attributed to Agha Mirak. By examining the materiality and conducting object-based research in-depth, I would be able to generate endless insights and new claims that would benefit my dissertation research which will explore image-making, text-image relations, and the materiality of the Arab and Persianate book art within a cosmopolitan or transcultural context by drawing upon Jami al-Tawarikh (Compendium of Chronicles), an illustrated world history book produced in the thirteenth century during Ilkhanid Mongols in Iran.
Also compelling to me is the operational mode of curation, in particular how it draws connections between various objects, generates themes or concepts, and weaves a broader context."