Martina Rugiadi
Narratives on the Medieval Periphery: Afghanistan at the Global Museum

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a Persianate empire rose at the eastern periphery of the Islamic world, connecting the region of present-day Afghanistan within the global medieval sphere. Its artistic and literary productions rank amongst the most influential and innovative of the period. Yet, these medieval objects remain comparatively marginal in art-historical canons, while anxieties about cultural heritage in conflict zones further confine them to fixed narratives. Foregrounding a forthcoming exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this lecture considers medieval Perso-Islamic notions of liminal regions alongside modern memories of revered histories, reflecting on alternative narratives for understanding the arts of the global past.

Martina Rugiadi is Curator in the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Co-Director of a joint Met/UCL archaeological project in Turkmenistan that investigates the lives of small towns along the so-called Silk Roads. She earned her PhD at the University of Naples, “L’Orientale” (2007) and has been a visiting fellow at MIT and the American Academy in Rome. Her research lies at the intersection of archaeology and art history with a focus on the medieval Islamic period. She has participated in archaeological projects in Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Jordan, and Oman. Her publications and exhibitions have addressed materiality and the makers (potters, carvers, restorers), the art-historical canon, and Ghaznavid and Seljuq-period visual and architectural languages. She is the co-author and co-editor of Court and Cosmos. The Great Age of the Seljuqs (2016; translated into Turkish in 2022) and The Seljuqs and their Successors: Art, Culture, and History (2020). Recent essays and articles were published in Muqarnas (2024), The Drill in Sculpture. From Ancient Egypt to Modernism (2025), The Brummer Galleries, Paris and New York: Defining Taste from Antiquities to the Avant-Garde (2023). Currently, she is preparing an exhibition and a book on the legacies of medieval Afghanistan, and a co-authoring a book on marble memorials as evidence of an expanded medieval private patronage.