David Roxburgh

David J. Roxburgh (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 1996) is Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor of Islamic Art History at Harvard University where he has taught in the Department of History of Art and Architecture since he completed the Ph.D. In his publications, Roxburgh has focused on primary written sources, manuscript painting, arts of the book, calligraphy, Timurid art and architecture, exchanges between China and the Islamic lands, travel narratives, and the pre-modern through contemporary histories of collecting, exhibitions, and museums. In several courses, he and his students have examined the consequences of the Mongol campaigns of the 1200s throughout Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Iran up to the late sixteenth century.

He has published two books, Prefacing the Image: The Writing of Art History in Sixteenth-Century Iran (Leiden: Brill, 2001), and The Persian Album 1400–1600: From Dispersal to Collection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), numerous articles, reviews, and chapters for themed volumes. He was editor for a special issue of Muqarnas 17 (2000) and most recently of Envisioning Islamic Art and Architecture: Essays in Honor of Renata Holod (Leiden: Brill, 2014). Roxburgh has also co-curated exhibitions (Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years [London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2005], and Traces of the Calligrapher: Islamic Calligraphy in Practice, c. 1600–1900 [Houston: Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 2007]). He is currently working on two books about illustrated Arabic manuscripts of the late 1100s through early 1200s and the study of Medieval architecture in Iran based on the archive of Myron Bement Smith in the Freer | Sackler, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.