Lectures in Art History: Lamia Balafrej “On Slavery and Technology in the Medieval Mediterranean”

Associate Professor Lamia Balafrej specializes in the arts of the medieval and early modern Islamic world with particular interests in the intersected histories of labor, technology, materiality, and representation. Her first book, The Making of the Artist in Late Timurid Painting (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), focused on Persian painting’s intricacy; it showed how visual abundance and linear precision worked to call attention to painting’s formation as image and object, thus reversing the political and pictorial hierarchies between patron and artist, image and text while raising questions about authorship, medium, and representation.

Her current book project addresses the relationship between body and instrument in medieval Islam, seen through the lens of slavery history. The book explores a range of issues: the presence and role of enslaved artists in courtly workshops; the theme of the artist as “corporeal instrument” in medieval sources; the connection between slavery and courtly art and aesthetics; and the conceptual linkage between slavery and technology. A portion of this research was just published as an article titled “Domestic Slavery, Skin Color, and Image Dialectic” in the journal Art History.

Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from various institutions, including the Forum Transregionale Studien (Berlin, Germany), the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), and the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC). Before coming to UCLA, she taught at Wellesley College. She first studied literature and art history at the University Mohammed V (Rabat, Morocco), before entering the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris in 2005. She received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Aix-Marseille in 2013. Come join this Zoom event to hear her lecture “On Slavery and Technology in the Medieval Mediterranean.” Register below:

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