At this year’s Deutscher Orientalistentag (DOT) in Erlangen, one packed day showcased panels by PI Ilse Sturkenboom, bringing the students’ research into sharp, compelling focus. Centred on the arts of the book across Persian, Ottoman, and Mughal contexts—from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries—the sessions also probed twentieth-century collecting, reminding us how later histories shape what (and how) we study today. Members of the ERC project Global Deco Paper—Lily Baumeister, Mandana Bender, and Theresa Zischkin—featured prominently, each advancing fresh methods and materials-centred insights.
Lily Baumeister examined “frame breaking” in a sixteenth-century Shirazi Shāhnāmah (Ms. or. fol. 359), analysing thirty-nine full-page illustrations. Combining close visual analysis with Statistical Codicology, she showed how images that push beyond their borders animate narrative, suggest three-dimensionality, and foreground the folio as a material object—insights sharpened through visualised data patterns.
Mandana Bender shed light on Turco-Persian illustrations and manuscripts in the Preetorius Collection (Museum Five Continents, Munich). Her assessment of seventy-six illustrations and five manuscripts bridged connoisseurship and collection history, foregrounding Emil Preetorius’s role in shaping German understandings of non-European art and the wider impact of individual collectors on narratives of Turco-Persian art in Europe.
Theresa Zischkin explored coloured, marbled, and gold-sprinkled papers in the Muraqqaʿ-i Gulshan. Arguing that decorated papers are integral to the album’s visual and intellectual programme, she demonstrated how a modular deployment of materials underpins aesthetic cohesion, indexes imperial workshop practices, and elevates the album’s status as a high-value cultural object.
In sum, the day’s conversations demonstrated the vitality of manuscript studies when production, materiality, and collecting are read together. DOT 2025 offered a compelling snapshot of where Islamic Art History is headed next, and our team members were delighted to be there!