Margaret Shortle
Margaret A. Shortle
PhD candidate, Boston University
Department of History of Art & Architecture
Kunstgeschichtliches Seminar
Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1
20146 Hamburg
Room: 116 (Main Building)
Tel.: +49 40 42838 8134
Fax: +49 40 42838 8145
E-Mail: mshortle@gmail.com
Project
Margaret’s dissertation project examines the combined presentation of visual, material and literary art in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Persian poetic anthologies and divans (collections of the poetry of one author) in Iran and Central Asia. She focuses her research on collections of the fourteenth-century poet Hafiz, whose ghazals (short lyric poems) invoke love and longing and are celebrated for their variety and flexibility of expression. The manuscripts studied often combine Hafiz’s interpretively difficult poems with an array of visual materials and single page paintings, including fantastic creatures, arabesque trees and other vegetal ornaments, and paired lovers in garden settings, and, thus, offer an under-explored opportunity to study the intersections of word, image and ornament in Islamic art. Drawing their rules and methods of production and consumption from those of poetry, Margaret suggests that these manuscripts’ visual and materials properties participate in the same multi-layered act of experience provided by the poetry. Importantly, the manuscripts draw on numerous repeated poetic metaphors that connect the natural world to ideal concepts of beauty. In the poetry, the metaphors often function so that the ideal and beautiful beloved often stands as a descriptor for nature, whose beauty and sensual pleasures wane and elicit desire for the return of spring and nature’s sensory bounty. Further, the poem’s creative expression and emotional content - desire, lamentation and its relief - are most commonly located in the natural world. Margaret’s project examines the possibility that seemingly repetitive landscapes and other garden scenes similarly utilize nature as a means for creative expression and aims to bring both the visual and verbal together by understanding how both similarly engage their audience.
Vita
Margaret is a Ph.D. Candidate at Boston University in the Department of History of Art & Architecture and specializes in Islamic Art and Persian book arts from the early modern period. She began to research and write her dissertation as Research Associate for the Emmy Noether-Nachwuchsgruppe, Kosmos/Ornatus. Ornamente in Persien und Frankreich um 1400 im Vergleich, at the Kunsthistorisches Institut at the Free University in Berlin. She has received additional support for her dissertation research from the American Research Institute in Turkey and Boston University’s Summer Travel Fellowship for graduate students. Margaret received her MA from the University of Chicago in Middle Eastern Studies with a thesis entitled, “Lithography, a Process of Translation and the Object of the Book in Islamic Art.”