Finbarr Barry Flood
Biographic Data
| ID | 956806 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Finbarr Barry Flood |
| GIVEN NAMES | Finbarr Barry |
| FAMILY NAME | Flood |
| SIGNATURE | FLOOD F B |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 90 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
From Incantation to Ingestion? Polemics and Politics of Islamic Bowl Magic
One of the shibboleths of modern scholarship is that the origins of engraved medieval metal vessels known as Islamic magic-medicinal bowls lie in a series of inked ceramic incantation bowls from late-antique Iraq. Since the Islamic bowls differ in their materiality, iconographic context, and function, the assumption is problematic. Moreover, despite the insistence on continuity in the face of a significant chronological disjunction between both k…
Traces of the Prophets
Global Microhistories and the Object Archive
Sitting at my laptop, I have a clear view of a small globular blue and white vessel perched on a nearby shelf (Fig. 1).Perhaps the base of a kalian, or more likely a vase, it was acquired in a junk shop in Krakow about fifteen years ago
Tales Things Tell
New perspectives on early globalisms from objects and images Tales Things Tell offers new perspectives on histories of connectivity between Africa, Asia, and Europe in the period before the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century. Reflected in objects and materials whose circulation and reception defined aesthetic, economic, and technological networks that existed outside established political and sectarian boundaries, many of these histories …
Between Cult and Culture
This article uses the recent controversy regarding the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas as a paradigm to challenge essentializing notions of an “Islamic” response to the image. Beginning with a history of premodern iconoclastic practice in the Islamic world, it explores the reception of the Bamiyan Buddhas in light of evidence for a complex range of responses to Buddhist and Hindu images in Afghanistan. Finally, it relates the destruction of Bu…
Bodies and Becoming
Reflections on Anthropomorphism
Before the Mughals
This article presents an overview of the current state of knowledge regarding the material culture of north India under the Delhi sultans and the regional sultanates that emerged in Bengal, Gujarat, Jaunpur, and Malwa during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Highlighting lacunae in existing scholarship, it also draws attention to material and textual sources that underline the strong transregional filiations of Sultanate art and architectur…
Objects of Translation
Ayrıca yazar İslam kültürü ile ilgili modern araştırmacının kalıp yargılarını da değiştirmesi gerektiği üzerinde durur. Zannedilenin aksine İslam kültürü, bizzat dinin kurgulanışı gereği bu hareketlilik fikrine açıktır. Bunun en önemli gösteren- lerinden biri takviminin peygamberin doğumu ile değil, yaptığı yolculuk hicret ile başlaması ve her ferdin hayatının bir döneminde hac yolculuğuna çıkmak durumunda oluşu olarak kabul edilmiştir
A Questionnaire on Monuments
A Questionnaire on Monuments" features 49 responses to questions formulated by Leah Dickerman, Hal Foster, David Joselit, and Carrie Lambert-Beatty: "From Charlottesville to Cape Town, there have been struggles over monuments and other markers involving histories of racial conflict. How do these charged situations shed light on the ethics of images in civil society today? Speaking generally or with specific examples in mind, please consider any o…
Picasso the Muslim
A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture
Frameworks of Islamic Art and Architectural History
Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture
Picasso the Muslim
Although the standard chronologies of modernism make its inception coincident with the perceived demise of Islamic art in the late nineteenth century, the pseudomorphic method was anticipated by several pioneering scholars of premodern Islamic art. Their writings constitute an unacknowledged chapter in the variegated historiography of the Bilderverbot, the image prohibition often assumed to be an inherent characteristic of Judaism and Islam. Para…
The Shrines of the ʿAlids in Medieval Syria
Animal, Vegetal, and Mineral
A series of enigmatic ninth- or tenth-century wall paintings from Nishapur in eastern Iran seems to have been imbued with amuletic, apotropaic, or talismanic properties. Recapitulating while exaggerating some of the properties of marble, the paintings also include anthropomorphic and vegetal imagery. Their idiosyncratic iconography seems to highlight a tension between physis and technē that may be relevant to the ambiguous ontology of efficacious…
Religion and Iconoclasm
Lost Histories of a Licit Figural Art
The idea that theology is either irrelevant to artistic production or “a baleful influence” on its history has recently been critically explored by Jeffrey Hamburger, in relation to medieval Christian art. Engaging the perennial problem of moving between immaterial concepts, normative texts, and material things, Hamburger's observations resonate with the long shadow cast by the Bilderverbot , the prohibition of images often assumed to characteriz…
Presentation, (re)animation, and the enchantments of technology
Architectural Associations
Lost in Translation
Lost in Translation
Founded by Oleg Grabar in 1983, Muqarnas is the first academic journal devoted to art, architectural history, archaeology, as well as all aspects of Islamic visual and material cultures, historical and contemporary. Full-length articles are accompanied by shorter submissions grouped under a separate section titled “Notes and Sources,” for which we particularly welcome studies that introduce textual and visual primary sources. Muqarnas is sponsore…
Image against Nature
Although the use of portable amulets and talismans in the pre-modern Islamic world is well documented, little is known about their monumental counterparts. Despite this neglect, references to apotropaia and talismans designed to offer protection from pests such as pigeons, snakes and scorpions are common in descriptions of medieval architecture in Arabia, Egypt, Syria and Iran. In many cases these consisted of pre-Islamic zoom-orphic spolia set a…
Correct Delineations and Promiscuous Outlines
This essay explores the representation of India to a British metropolitan audience in the last decades of the eighteenth century, a time of burgeoning orientalist scholarship. Texts and images produced during the period reveal many of the ambiguities and ambivalences in the evolving relationship between Parliament, the East India Company and native Indian rulers. Between 1788 and 1795 these were highlighted dramatically in the impeachment proceed…
Between Cult and Culture
This article uses the recent controversy regarding the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas as a paradigm to challenge essentializing notions of an “Islamic” response to the image. Beginning with a history of premodern iconoclastic practice in the Islamic world, it explores the reception of the Bamiyan Buddhas in light of evidence for a complex range of responses to Buddhist and Hindu images in Afghanistan. Finally, it relates the destruction of Bu…
A Questionnaire on Monuments
A Questionnaire on Monuments" features 49 responses to questions formulated by Leah Dickerman, Hal Foster, David Joselit, and Carrie Lambert-Beatty: "From Charlottesville to Cape Town, there have been struggles over monuments and other markers involving histories of racial conflict. How do these charged situations shed light on the ethics of images in civil society today? Speaking generally or with specific examples in mind, please consider any o…
Image against Nature
Although the use of portable amulets and talismans in the pre-modern Islamic world is well documented, little is known about their monumental counterparts. Despite this neglect, references to apotropaia and talismans designed to offer protection from pests such as pigeons, snakes and scorpions are common in descriptions of medieval architecture in Arabia, Egypt, Syria and Iran. In many cases these consisted of pre-Islamic zoom-orphic spolia set a…
Lost Histories of a Licit Figural Art
The idea that theology is either irrelevant to artistic production or “a baleful influence” on its history has recently been critically explored by Jeffrey Hamburger, in relation to medieval Christian art. Engaging the perennial problem of moving between immaterial concepts, normative texts, and material things, Hamburger's observations resonate with the long shadow cast by the Bilderverbot , the prohibition of images often assumed to characteriz…
Correct Delineations and Promiscuous Outlines
This essay explores the representation of India to a British metropolitan audience in the last decades of the eighteenth century, a time of burgeoning orientalist scholarship. Texts and images produced during the period reveal many of the ambiguities and ambivalences in the evolving relationship between Parliament, the East India Company and native Indian rulers. Between 1788 and 1795 these were highlighted dramatically in the impeachment proceed…
Ghurid monuments and Muslim identities
The eastward expansion of the Shansabanid sultanate of Ghur in the late twelfth century has usually been depicted as a confrontation between a unitary Muslim self and its Hindu ‘other’. The reification of heterogeneous and protean categories of belief implicit in this paradigm is particularly ill suited to represent the dynamic religious life of mediaeval Ghur. This was characterised by shifting patterns of royal patronage that reflect intense co…
Pillars, Palimpsests, and Princely Practices
Tales Things Tell
New perspectives on early globalisms from objects and images Tales Things Tell offers new perspectives on histories of connectivity between Africa, Asia, and Europe in the period before the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century. Reflected in objects and materials whose circulation and reception defined aesthetic, economic, and technological networks that existed outside established political and sectarian boundaries, many of these histories …
Picasso the Muslim
Although the standard chronologies of modernism make its inception coincident with the perceived demise of Islamic art in the late nineteenth century, the pseudomorphic method was anticipated by several pioneering scholars of premodern Islamic art. Their writings constitute an unacknowledged chapter in the variegated historiography of the Bilderverbot, the image prohibition often assumed to be an inherent characteristic of Judaism and Islam. Para…
Religion and Iconoclasm
Herakles and the ‘Perpetual Acolyte’ of the Buddha
(1989). Herakles and the ‘Perpetual Acolyte’ of the Buddha: Some Observations on the Iconography of Vajrapani in Gandharan Art. South Asian Studies: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 17-27
Mobility and Mutation
(1991). Mobility and Mutation: Iranian Hunting Themes in the Murals of Alchi, Western Himalayas. South Asian Studies: Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 21-35
The Earliest Islamic Windows as Architectural Decoration
Umawad Survivals and Mamluk Revivals
The Medieval Trophy as an Art Historical Trope
The Medieval Trophy as an Art Historical Trope
Founded by Oleg Grabar in 1983, Muqarnas is the first academic journal devoted to art, architectural history, archaeology, as well as all aspects of Islamic visual and material cultures, historical and contemporary. Full-length articles are accompanied by shorter submissions grouped under a separate section titled “Notes and Sources,” for which we particularly welcome studies that introduce textual and visual primary sources. Muqarnas is sponsore…
The Medieval Trophy as an Art Historical Trope
A Group of Reused Byzantine Tables as Evidence for Seljuq Architectural Patronage in Damascus
Pillars, Palimpsests, and Princely Practices
Ghurid monuments and Muslim identities
The eastward expansion of the Shansabanid sultanate of Ghur in the late twelfth century has usually been depicted as a confrontation between a unitary Muslim self and its Hindu ‘other’. The reification of heterogeneous and protean categories of belief implicit in this paradigm is particularly ill suited to represent the dynamic religious life of mediaeval Ghur. This was characterised by shifting patterns of royal patronage that reflect intense co…
Between Creation and Destruction
Image against Nature
Although the use of portable amulets and talismans in the pre-modern Islamic world is well documented, little is known about their monumental counterparts. Despite this neglect, references to apotropaia and talismans designed to offer protection from pests such as pigeons, snakes and scorpions are common in descriptions of medieval architecture in Arabia, Egypt, Syria and Iran. In many cases these consisted of pre-Islamic zoom-orphic spolia set a…
Correct Delineations and Promiscuous Outlines
This essay explores the representation of India to a British metropolitan audience in the last decades of the eighteenth century, a time of burgeoning orientalist scholarship. Texts and images produced during the period reveal many of the ambiguities and ambivalences in the evolving relationship between Parliament, the East India Company and native Indian rulers. Between 1788 and 1795 these were highlighted dramatically in the impeachment proceed…
Lost in Translation
Lost in Translation
Founded by Oleg Grabar in 1983, Muqarnas is the first academic journal devoted to art, architectural history, archaeology, as well as all aspects of Islamic visual and material cultures, historical and contemporary. Full-length articles are accompanied by shorter submissions grouped under a separate section titled “Notes and Sources,” for which we particularly welcome studies that introduce textual and visual primary sources. Muqarnas is sponsore…
Architectural Associations
Presentation, (re)animation, and the enchantments of technology
Lost Histories of a Licit Figural Art
The idea that theology is either irrelevant to artistic production or “a baleful influence” on its history has recently been critically explored by Jeffrey Hamburger, in relation to medieval Christian art. Engaging the perennial problem of moving between immaterial concepts, normative texts, and material things, Hamburger's observations resonate with the long shadow cast by the Bilderverbot , the prohibition of images often assumed to characteriz…
The Shrines of the ʿAlids in Medieval Syria
Animal, Vegetal, and Mineral
A series of enigmatic ninth- or tenth-century wall paintings from Nishapur in eastern Iran seems to have been imbued with amuletic, apotropaic, or talismanic properties. Recapitulating while exaggerating some of the properties of marble, the paintings also include anthropomorphic and vegetal imagery. Their idiosyncratic iconography seems to highlight a tension between physis and technē that may be relevant to the ambiguous ontology of efficacious…
Religion and Iconoclasm
A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture
Frameworks of Islamic Art and Architectural History
Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture
Picasso the Muslim
Although the standard chronologies of modernism make its inception coincident with the perceived demise of Islamic art in the late nineteenth century, the pseudomorphic method was anticipated by several pioneering scholars of premodern Islamic art. Their writings constitute an unacknowledged chapter in the variegated historiography of the Bilderverbot, the image prohibition often assumed to be an inherent characteristic of Judaism and Islam. Para…
History (30 works) · Art (24 works) · Archaeology (19 works) · Islam (15 works) · History (14 works) · Art history (13 works) · Ancient history (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Islamic Studies and History (10 works)