Mahroo Moosavi, Ph.D.

Mahroo Moosavi is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the interdisciplinary programme 4A Laboratory: Art Histories, Archaeologies, Anthropologies, Aesthetics (October 2023 – June 2025). She is an historian of early modern Iran, specialised in the intersections of art and literature of the 16^th and 17^th centuries Iran and the broader Persianate world. Mahroo is particularly interested in the psychic-thematic and architectonic connotations and micro-polities of the textually inscribed objects and written artefacts, such as the manuscripts, and the epigraphic programme of public buildings of the major Safavid cities like Isfahan. Her research is also concerned with new readings of the arts of Islam and Iran through blurring the boundaries between the visual and textual cultures, such as in the cases of the illustrated manuscripts of the Safavids (1501-1722).  From 2021 to 2023, she has held post-doctoral fellowships and visiting lectureships at the University of Oxford, including the Bahari Fellowship in the Persian Arts of the Book at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, the Nizami Ganjavi Centre Fellowship, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford, and Oliver Smithies Lectureship at Balliol College, University of Oxford. Her research has been supported by the British Academy, the British Institute of Persian Studies, University of Oxford, the Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London amongst others.