ROBERT HILLENBRAND - CONCISE C.V.
Professor Robert Hillenbrand was educated at the universities of Cambridge (Englsih Literature; M.A.) and Oxford (Oriental Studies; D.Phil. 1974). Between those dates he worked in the Administrative Class of the Civil Service and began to undertake research for his doctorate.He taught at the Department of Fine Art in the University of Edinburgh from 1971, and was awarded a chair of Islamic art there in 1989. His travels have taken him throughout the Islamic world. He has held visiting professorships at Princeton, UCLA, Bamberg, Dartmouth College, Beirut and Groningen. From 1992 to 2004 he held a short-term visiting professorship at Leiden. In 1993 he delivered the Kevorkian Lectures at New York University, and in 2004 he was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the American University in Cairo. He delivered the Runciman Lecture at King’s College, London, in 2010. In 2012 he was elected Honorary Fellow of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft. His scholarly interests focus on Islamic architecture, painting and iconography, with particular reference to Iran and early Islamic Syria. He works with the following languages: German (native speaker), French (excellent), Italian (reading knowledge), Spanish (reading knowledge), Persian (colloquial) and Arabic (good knowledge for epigraphic purposes). He has lectured in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, India, China, Japan, Russia, Canada, and throughout Europe and the United States.
He has written the following twelve books: Imperial Images in Persian Painting; Islamic Art and Architecture (translated into German and Turkish in 2005, Danish in 2008 and Persian in 2009; revised and expanded ed. 2021); The Architecture of Ottoman Jerusalem: An Introduction; Studies in Medieval Islamic Architecture (2 vols.); the prize-winning Islamic Architecture: Form, Function and Meaning (translated into Persian in 1998 and 2000); The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque; Studies in Islamic Painting; The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque. A landmark of modern Islamic architecture; Studies in the Islamic Decorative Arts; An unknown masterpiece from Mongol Iran; and Islamic Architecture in North Africa (co-author). In addition, he has edited seven books and co-edited five more. He has also published some 160 articles on aspects of Islamic art and architecture.
In 1977 he curated one of the largest exhibitions of Persian miniature painting ever held, with over 250 exhibits. He has also organised nine international symposia at Edinburgh on aspects of Islamic art. He has served on the editorial boards of Art History, Persica, Assaph, The Journal of the David Collection, Bulletin of the Asia Institute, Studies in Islamic Art and Architecture and Oxford Studies in Islamic Art. He was Islamic art adviser to the 36-volume Macmillan Dictionary of Art. He has also served on the Councils of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, British Research in the Levant, and the British Institute of Persian Studies (Vice-President for 11 years; Honorary Vice-President for life); is currently Chairman of the Academic Council of the Iran Heritage Foundation; has served as a Trustee of Edinburgh University Press; and was on the Art History panel of the nation-wide Research Assessment Exercise for 2000-2007. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and is currently Professorial Fellow of Art History at the University of St Andrews.
In 1996 he was awarded the Alice David Hitchcock medallion of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain for his book Islamic Architecture: Form, Function and Meaning. In 2006 he was awarded the Book of the Year prize of the Islamic Republic of Iran for Shahnama: the Visual Language of the Book of Kings. In 2008 he received the Iris Foundation Scholar’s Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Decorative Arts in New York. In 2013 he was appointed Ehrenmitglied (Honorary Member) of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft. In 2018 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Iranian Studies in California, and in 2019 he received, with his wife Carole, the Medal of the Royal Asiatic Society, the Society’s highest award, given periodically in recognition of outstanding contributions to the field of Asian studies.
From 1999-2004 he was co-director of the Cambridge/Edinburgh Shahnama Project, which was awarded a grant of £410,000 by the AHRB. A Festschrift for him appeared in 2005: The Iconography of Islamic Art. Studies in Honour of Robert Hillenbrand, ed. B. O’Kane. In 2006-7 he served as Director of the newly-established Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World, which comprises a consortium of the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester and Durham. It was funded with £5,000,0000 over five years by the AHRC, ESRC, HEFCE and the SFC, with the remit of substantially increasing national capacity in Arabic and fostering outreach to the public about the Arab world. He was Slade Professor of Art at the University of Cambridge in 2008, and served as Chief Curator of the Royal Academy exhibition “Syria”, which was cancelled as a result of the civil war.
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Robert Hillenbrand
LIST OF PUBLICATIONS
& = in academia.edu
SINGLE-AUTHORED BOOKS
1. Imperial Images in Persian Painting (Edinburgh, 1977), 105 pp.
2. Islamic Architecture. Form, Function and Meaning (Edinburgh, 1994); revised pbk. ed. Edinburgh, 2000 (separate Persian translations published in 1999 and 2001), 645 pp.
3. Islamic Art and Architecture (London and New York, 1999), 288 pp. (translated into German and Turkish, 2005; Danish, 2008; Persian, 2009); revised and expanded ed. 2021, 335 pp.
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The Architecture of Ottoman Jerusalem. An Introduction (London, 2001) 127 pp.
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Studies in Medieval Islamic Architecture. Volume I (Collected Articles) (London, 2001), 558 pp.
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Studies in Medieval Islamic Architecture. Volume II (Collected Articles) (London, 2006), 640 pp.
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The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque (Abu Dhabi, 2010), 170 pp.
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The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque. A landmark of modern Islamic architecture (Abu Dhabi, 2012), 222 pp. (Arabic translation: Jami‘ al-Shaikh Zayid al-Kabir. Ma‘alam al- Handasiyya al-Islamiyya al-Haditha [tr. Hiba Nasir, checked by Jurj Abi Salih], Abu Dhabi 2012)
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Studies in the Islamic Arts of the Book (London, 2012), 556 pp.
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Studies in the Islamic Decorative Arts (London, 2019), 520 pp.
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The Holy Ark of Isfahan. An unknown masterpiece from Mongol Iran (London, 2019), 172 pp.
CO-AUTHORED BOOK
12. Islamic Architecture in North Africa (London, 1976) (Co-author with L.Golvin;
photographs by D.Hill), 167 pp.
BOOKS EDITED
13. Proceedings of the 10th Congress of the :union: Européenne des Arabisants et
Islamisants. Edinburgh 9-16 September 1980 (Edinburgh, 1982), 129 pp.
14. The Islamic Book (Princeton, 1984), 175 pp.
15. The Art of the Saljuqs in Iran and Anatolia (Costa Mesa, California, 1994), 313 pp.
16. The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Persia. New Light on the Parthian and Sasanian
Empires. eds. V.S.Curtis, R.Hillenbrand and J.M.Rogers (London, 1998), 192 pp.
17. The ‘Amiriya in Rada‘. The History and Restoration of a Sixteenth-century Madrasa in
the Yemen (Oxford Studies in Islamic Art, XIII), by S.Al-Radi, with contributions
from V.Porter and R.Barnes, ed. R.Hillenbrand (Oxford, 1998), 216 pp.
18. Ottoman Jerusalem. The Living City 1517-1917, eds. S.J.Auld and R.Hillenbrand,
2 vols. (London, 2000), 1168 pp.
19. Persian Painting from the Mongols to the Qajars. Studies In Honour of
Basil W. Robinson (London, 2001), 331 pp.
20. Shahnama. The Visual Language of the Persian Book of Kings (Aldershot
and Burlington, Vt., 2004), 184 pp.
21. Image and Meaning in Islamic Art (London, 2005), 320 pp.
22. Ayyubid Jerusalem. The Holy City in Context 1187-1250, eds. R.Hillenbrand and
S.J.Auld (London, 2009), 517 pp.
23. Beiträge zur Islamischer Kunt und Archäologie, Band 3, eds. L.Korn, A.Heidenreich,B.Finster, B.Henning, R.Hillenbrand, M.Kühn, M.Ritter, and R.Schick
(Wiesbaden, 2012)
24. Ferdowsi, the Mongols and the History of Iran. Art, Literature and Culture from
early Islam to Qajar Persia. Studies in Honour of Charles Melville, eds.
R.Hillenbrand, A.C.S.Peacock and F.Abdullaeva (London and New York,
2013), xxvi and 406 pp.
25. The Making of Islamic Art. Studies in Honour of Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom (Edinburgh, 2021), xvii and 430 pp.
CONTRIBUTIONS TO BOOKS (over 20 pages)
& 25a. Translation of sections of Ardabil, Grabmoschee des Schech Safi. Denkmäler persischer Baukunst II by F.Sarre (Berlin, 1924), in M.E.Weaver, Preliminary Study on the Conservation Problems of Five Iranian Monuments (Paris, 1970), 73-97.
26. “Die Kunst der Umayyaden”, in Propyläen Kunstgeschichte. Die Kunst des Islam, eds.
B.Spuler and J.Sourdel-Thomine (Berlin, 1973), 145-77.
& 27. “Art in the Persian Gulf”, in The Persian Gulf States. A General Survey, ed. A.J.Cottrell (Baltimore, 1980), 414-84.
& 28. “Islamic Art at the Crossroads: East versus West at Mshatta”, in Essays in Islamic Art
and Architecture in Honor of Katharina Otto-Dorn, ed. A.Daneshvari (Malibu, 1981),
63-86.
& 29. “The flanged tomb tower at Bastam”, in Art et société dans le monde iranien, ed.
C.Adle (Paris, 1982), 237-60.
30. “The Islamic Art of Iran”, in A Bibliographical Guide to Iran, ed. L.P.Elwell-Sutton
(Brighton, 1983), 295-333.
31. Co-author of “Architecture: Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia”, in A Bibliography
of the Architecture, Arts and Crafts of Islam. Second Supplement Jan.1972-Dec.1980
eds. J.D.Pearson, M.Meinecke and G.T.Scanlon (Cairo, 1984), 65-112.
& 32. “The role of tradition in Qajar religious architecture”, in Qajar Iran. Political, Social and Cultural Change 1800-1925, Studies in Honour of L.P.Elwell-Sutton, eds. C.E.Bosworth and C.Hillenbrand (Edinburgh, 1984), 352-82.
& 33. “The Mosque in the Medieval Islamic World”, in Architecture in Continuity. Building
in the Islamic World Today, ed. S.Cantacuzino (New York, 1985), 30-51.
& 34. “Eastern Islamic Influences in Syria: Raqqa and Qal‘at Ja‘bar in the later 12th century”,
in The Art of Syria and the Jazira 1100-1250. Oxford Studies in Islamic Art 1, ed.
J.Raby (Oxford, 1985), 21-48.
& 35. “Safavid Architecture”, in The Cambridge History of Iran. 6. The Timurid and Safavid
Periods, eds. P.Jackson and L.Lockhart (Cambridge, 1986), 759-842.
& 36. “Aspects of Timurid Architecture in Central Asia”, in Utrecht Papers on Central Asia.
Proceedings of the First European Seminar of Central Asian Studies held at Utrecht, 16-18 December 1985, eds. M.van Damme and H.Boeschoten (Utrecht, 1987), 255-86.
37. “Maqabir” (“Mausolea”), in Mi‘mari-yi Iran daureh-yi Islami (“Iranian Architecture of the Islamic Period”), ed. M.Y.Kiani (Tehran, 1344 A.S.H. /1987), 23 51.
& 38. “The Islamic Architecture of Persia”, in The Arts of Persia, ed. R.W.Ferrier (New Haven and London, 1989), 80-107, 318-20.
& 39. “‘The Ornament of the World’. Medieval Cordoba as a Cultural Centre”, in The
Legacy of Muslim Spain. Handbuch der Orientalistik, Abt.1, Bd.12, ed. S.K.Jayyusi
(Leiden, New York and Köln, 1992), 112-35.
& 40. “The Uses of Space in Timurid Painting”, in Timurid Art and Culture. Iran and Central Asia in the Fifteenth Century, eds. L.Golombek and M.Subtelny (Leiden, 1992), 76-102.
& 41. “Splendour & Austerity. Islamic Architectural Ornament”, in Asian Art, ed. J.Tilden
(London, 1995), 6-27.
& 42. “Images of Authority on Kashan Lustreware”, in Islamic Art in the Ashmolean
Museum, Part I, ed. J.W.Allan (Oxford Studies in Islamic Art, X) (Oxford, 1995)
167-98.
& 43. “The Iconography of the Shah-nama-yi Shahi”, in Safavid Persia. The History and
Politics of an Islamic Society, ed. C.Melville (London and New York, 1996), 53-78.
& 44. “The Iskandar Cycle in the Great Mongol Shahnama”, in The Problematics of Power.
Eastern and Western Representations of Alexander the Great, eds. M.Bridges and
J.Ch.Bürgel (Bern, 1996), 203-30.
& 45. “‘Anjar and early Islamic urbanism”, in The Idea and Ideal of the Town between Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, eds. G.P.Broglio and B.Ward-Perkins (Leiden, 1999), 59-98.
46. “Islamic Architecture” in Shogukan Encyclopaedia of World Art, eds. T.Sugimura
et al. (Tokyo, 1999), 289-336.
& 47. “The Architecture of the Ghaznavids and Ghurids”, in The Sultan’s Turret: Studies in Persian and Turkish Culture in Honour of Edmund Bosworth, ed. C.Hillenbrand
(Leiden, 2000), 124-206.
& 48. “Umayyad woodwork in the Aqsa Mosque”, in Bayt al-Maqdis II, ed. J.Johns (Oxford
Studies in Islamic Art XIV) (Oxford, 2000), 271-310.
& 49. “Structure, style and context in the monuments of Ottoman Jerusalem”, in Ottoman
Jerusalem. The Islamic City 1517-1917, eds. S.J.Auld and R.Hillenbrand (London,
2000) I, 1-23.
& 50. “The Ghurid tomb in Herat", in Cairo to Kabul. Afghan and Islamic Studies presented to Ralph Pinder-Wilson, eds. W.Ball and L.Harrow (London, 2002), 123-43.
& 51. “The Arts of the Book in Ilkhanid Iran", in The Legacy of Genghis Khan. Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia, 1256 – 1353, eds. L.Komaroff and S.Carboni (New York, 2002), 134-67.
& 52. “The sarcophagus of Shah Isma‘il at Ardabil", in Society and Culture in the Early Modern Middle East. Studies on Iran in the Safavid Period, ed. A.J.Newman (Leiden, 2003), 165-92.
& 53. “The one that got away: Ernst Herzfeld and the Islamic architecture of Iran”, in Ernst Herzfeld and the development of Near Eastern Studies, 1900-1950, eds. A.C.Gunter and S.R.Hauser (Leiden and Boston, Mass., 2004), 405-26.
& 54. “The Timurid Achievement in Architecture”, in A Survey of Persian Art. The Islami
Period XVIII, ed. A.Daneshvari (Costa Mesa, 2005), 83-126.
& 55. “Erudition Exalted: The Double Frontispiece to the Epistles of the Sincere Brethren”, in Beyond the Legacy of Genghis Khan, ed. L.Komaroff (Leiden and Boston, 2006), 183-212.
& 56. “The Shahnama and the Persian Illustrated Book”, in Literary Cultures and the Material Book, eds. S.Eliot, A.Nash and I.Willison (London, 2007), 95-119.
57. “L’arte islamica”, in L’arte occidentale: Europa mediterraneo e mondo
contemporaneo, ed. J.Sureda, Italian ed. R.Caasanelli (Milan, 2008), 281-315.
& 58. “The Art of the Ayyubids: an Overview”, in Ayyubid Jerusalem. The Holy City in
Context 1187-1250, eds. R.Hillenbrand and S.J.Auld (London, 2009), 22-44.
& 59. “The Ayyubid Aqsa”, in Ayyubid Jerusalem. The Holy City in Context 1187-1250, eds. R.Hillenbrand and S.J.Auld (London, 2009), 301-26.
& 60. “The Classical Author Portrait Islamicized”, in Crusades – Medieval Worlds in Conflict,eds. T.F.Madden, J.L.Naus and V.Ryan (Farnham and Burlington, Vt., 2010), 47-74.
& 61. “Western scholarship on Persian Painting before 1914: Collectors, Exhibitions and
Franco-German Rivalry”, in After One Hundred Years. The 1910 Exhibition
‘Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst’ Reconsidered, eds. A.Lermer and A.Shalem (Leiden and Boston, 2010), 201-29.
& 62. “The Seljuq Monuments of Turkmenistan”, in Christian Lange and Songül Mecit (eds), The Seljuqs. Politics, Society and Culture (Edinburgh, 2011), 277-308.
& 63. “Islamic monumental inscriptions contextualised: location, content, legibility and
aesthetics”, in L.Korn, A.Heidenreich, B.Finster, B.Henning, R.Hillenbrand, M.Kühn, M.Ritter, and R.Schick (eds), Beiträge zur Islamischen Kunst und
Archäologie, Band 3 (Wiesbaden, 2012), 13-38.
&64. “Reflections on the Mosaics of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus”, in A. Al- Helabi, D.G.Letsios, M. Al-Moraekhi and A. Al-Abduljabbar (eds), Arabia, Greece and Byzantium. Cultural Contacts in Ancient and Medieval Times II (Riyadh, 2012), 163-201.
& 65. “Architecture and Politics: The North and South Dome Chambers of the Isfahan Jami‘”, in E.Herzig and S.Stewart (eds), The Age of the Saljuqs. The Idea of Iran, 6 (London, 2014), 149-74.
& 66. “Content versus context in Samanid epigraphic pottery”, in A.C.S.Peacock and D.G.Tor (eds), Medieval Central Asia and the Persianate World. Iranian Tradition and Islamic Civilisation (London and New York, 2015), 56-107.
& 67. “The Uses of Light in Islamic Architecture”, in J.Bloom and S.Blair (eds), God is the Light of the Heavens and the Earth. Light in Islamic Art and Architecture (New Haven and London, 2015), 86-121.
& 68. “The Scramble for Persian Art: Pope and His Rivals”, in Y.Kadoi (ed.), Arthur Upham Pope and a New Survey of Persian Art (Leiden and Boston, 2016), 14-45.
& 69. “Brick versus Stone: Seljuq Architecture in Iran and Anatolia”, on I.K.Poonawala (ed.), Turks in the Indian Subcontinet, Central and West Asia (Delhi, 2016), 105-43.
& 70. “The Great Mongol Shahnama: Some Proposed Repatriations”, in J.Gonnella, F.Weis and C.Rauch (eds), The Diez Albums. Contexts and Contents (Leiden and Boston, 2017), 441-68.
& 71. “The Image of the Black in Islamic Art: The Case of Painting”, in D.Bindman, S.P.Blier and H.L.Gates, Jr. (eds), The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art (Cambridge, Mass., 2017), 215-53.
& 72. “The Frontispiece Problem in the Early 13th-Century Kitab al-Aghani”, in L.Korn and M.Müller-Wiener (eds), Central Periphery? Art, Culture and History of the Medieval Jazira (Wiesbaden, 2017), 199-227.
& 73. “Hisham’s balancing act: the case of Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi”, in A.Marsham and A.George (eds), Power, Patronage and Memory in Early Islam: Perspectives on Umayyad Elites (New York, 2017), 83-133.
74. “Medieval Muslim veneration of the Dome of the Rock” , in R.Griffiths-Jones and E.Fernie (eds), Tomb & Temple. Re-imagining the Sacred Buildings of Jerusalem
(Woodbridge, 2018), 125-45.
75. “Building Sites in Medieval Persian Painting”, in A.Anisi (ed.), Adle Nameh. Studies in
Memory of Chahriyar Adle (Tehran, 2018), 53-74.
76. “The Lure of the Exotic: The Byzantine Heritage in Islamic Book Painting”, in Z.Chitwood and J.Pahlitzsch (eds), Ambassadors, Artists, Theologians. Byzantine Relations with the Near East from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Centuries (Mainz, 2019), 193-213.
77. “Courtly Love – Persian Style”, in Shahin Aryamanesh (ed.), Farr-e Firouz, Distinguished Scholars of Cultural Heritage of Iran (Vol 5). Special Edition in Honor of Firouz Bagherzadeh (Tehran, 2019), 207-42
78. “The Multiple Faces of Restoration in the Medieval Islamic Architecture of Central Asia”, in R. Hillenbrand (ed.), The Making of Islamic Art. Studies in Honour of Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom (Edinburgh, May 2021), 71-116
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hillenbrand
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