Book Chat Series: Davis Humanities Institute 2022-23

Talinn Grigor will be speaking October 12, Wednesday from 5:30- 7:00 pm at the I-House on her book, The Persian Revival: The Imperialism of the Copy in Iranian and Parsi Architecture. (2021). This guide provides library resources related to this book. 

Note about the book from Publisher:  One of the most heated scholarly controversies of the early twentieth century, the Orient-or-Rome debate turned on whether art historians should trace the origin of all Western—and especially Gothic—architecture to Roman ingenuity or to the Indo-Germanic Geist. Focusing on the discourses around this debate, Talinn Grigor considers the Persian Revival movement in light of imperial strategies of power and identity in British India and in Qajar-Pahlavi Iran.

The Persian Revival examines Europe’s discovery of ancient Iran, first in literature and then in art history. Tracing Western visual discourse about ancient Iran from 1699 on, Grigor parses the invention and use of a revivalist architectural style from the Afsharid and Zand successors to the Safavid throne and the rise of the Parsi industrialists as cosmopolitan subjects of British India. Drawing on a wide range of Persian revival narratives bound to architectural history, Grigor foregrounds the complexities and magnitude of artistic appropriations of Western art history in order to grapple with colonial ambivalence and imperial aspirations. She argues that while Western imperialism was instrumental in shaping high art as mercantile-bourgeois ethos, it was also a project that destabilized the hegemony of a Eurocentric historiography of taste.

An important reconsideration of the Persian Revival, this book will be of vital interest to art and architectural historians and intellectual historians, particularly those working in the areas of international modernism, Iranian studies, and historiography.

Note about the Author: Talinn Grigor is a UC Davis Professor of Art History, Modern and Contemporary Global Architecture, and Art Critical and (post)Colonial Theory. Grigor’s research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century art and architectural histories through the framework of postcolonial and critical theories, grounded in Iran, Armeno-Iran, and Parsi India. She is the author of many books and articles. Books include, Contemporary Iranian Art: From the Street to the Studio (Reaktion, 2014); and Building Iran: Modernism, Architecture, and National Heritage under the Pahlavi Monarchs (Periscope, 2009).Her latest book, The Persian Revival: The Imperialism of the Copy in Iranian and Parsi Architecture (Penn State Univ., 2021) won the Saidi-Sirjani Book Award from the Association of Iranian Studies. Tallin Grigor holds a Ph.D. and M.S, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a B.Arch. from University of Southern California.

 

Note: To access these citations, copy and paste the italicized titles in the UC Library Search catalog.

 

Babaie, Sussan, and Talinn Grigor. Persian Kingship and Architecture: Strategies of Power in Iran from the Achaemenids to the Pahlavis. I.B. Tauris, 2015.

Boyce, Mary. Zoroastrianism: Its Antiquity and Constant Vigour. Mazda Publishers in association with Bibliotheca Persica, 1992.

Dabashi, Hamid. Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene. Harvard University Press, 2015.

Gharipour, Mohammad. Architectural Dynamics in Pre-Revolutionary Iran: Dialogic Encounter between Tradition and Modernity. Intellect, 2019.

Hatt, Michael. Art History: A Critical Introduction to Its Methods. University Press, 2006.

Ian Chilvers. Persian Art. 1st ed., Oxford University Press, 2016.

Iran Heritage Foundation, and Touraj Atabaki. Iran in the 20th Century: Historiography and Political Culture. I.B. Tauris in association with the Iran Heritage Foundation, 2009.

Iversen, Margaret. Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory. MIT Press, 1993.

Khaghani, Saeid. Islamic Architecture in Iran: Poststructural Theory and the Architectural History of Iranian Mosques. I.B. Tauris, 2012.

O’Kane, Bernard. Studies in Persian Architecture. University Press, 2021.

Persian Heritage Foundation, et al. Persian Historiography. I.B. Tauris, 2012.

Pevsner, Nikolaus. Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century. Clarendon Press, 1972.

Pope, Arthur Upham. Introducing Persian Architecture. Oxford University Press, 1971.

---. Persian Architecture; the Triumph of Form and Color. G. Braziller, 1965.

Riegl, Alois. Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament. Princeton University Press, 1992.

Stierlin, Henri. Persian Art & Architecture. Thames & Hudson, 2012.

Strzygowski, Josef. Origin of Christian Church Art, New Facts and Principles of Research. Clarendon Press, 1923.

---. Ursprung der christlichen Kirchenkunst, neue tatsachen und Grundsätze der Kunstforschung. J.C. Hinrichs, 1920.

Subtelny, Maria. Le monde est un jardin: aspects de l’histoire culturelle de l’Iran médiéval. Association pour l’avancement des études iraniennes, 2002.

Susan Wilson, and James Stevens Curl. Persian. 3rd ed., Oxford University Press, 2015.

Traditions architecturales en Iran. Organisation Nationale pour la Protection des Monuments Historiques, 1975.

Visual World of Persianate Culture, and Yuka Kadoi. Persian Art: Image-Making in Eurasia. University Press Ltd, 2018.

Wharton, Annabel Jane. Refiguring the Post Classical City: Dura Europos, Jerash, Jerusalem, and Ravenna. Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Note: To access these citations, copy and paste the italicized titles in the UC Library Search catalog.

 

Grigor, Talinn. A Network of Inconsistencies in Iran’s Nationalism. University of Toronto Press, 2021.

---. Cultivat (Ing) Modernities: The Society for National Heritage, Political Propaganda, and Public Architecture in Twentieth-Century Iran. 2004.

---. “Orient Oder Rom? Qajar ‘Aryan’ Architecture and Strzygowski’s Art History.” The Art Bulletin, vol. 89, no. 3, 2007, pp. 562–90.

---. “Persian Architectural Revivals in the British Raj and Qajar Iran.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 36, no. 3, 2016, pp. 384–97.

---. “(Re) Framing Rapid Modernities: American Historians of Iranian Architecture, Phyllis Ackerman and Arthur Pope.” Arris, vol. 15, no. 1, 2004, pp. 39–55.

---. “Recultivating ‘Good Taste’: The Early Pahlavi Modernists and Their Society for National Heritage.” Iranian Studies, vol. 37, no. 1, 2004, pp. 17–45.

---. “Return of the Avant-Garde to the Streets of Tehran.” Rethinking Iranian Nationalism and Modernity, University of Texas Press, 2021, pp. 233–52.

---. “The King’s White Walls: Modernism and Bourgeois Architecture.” Culture and Cultural Politics under Reza Shah, Routledge, 2013, pp. 109–32.

---. “They Have Not Changed in 2,500 Years”: Art, Archaeology, and Modernity in Iran.” Unmasking Ideology in Imperial and Colonial Archaeology: Vocabulary, Symbols, and Legacy. Ideas, Debates, and Perspectives, 2018, pp. 121–46.

---. “Time of Historicism, Print Revival, and Parsi Patronage of Architecture, 1887–1936.” Iranian Studies, 2022, pp. 1–28.