About the Event
The Department of Art History cordially invites everyone to virtually attend a public lecture featuring Talinn Grigor, Professor and Chair of the Art History Program at the University of California, Davis, on November 4th!
The webinar will be moderated by Rice University’s Fabiola López-Dúran, Associate Professor of Art History, and Farshid Emami, Assistant Professor of Art History.
This lecture is free and open to the Rice community and public.
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About the lecture:
In 1822 six fire temples adorned the cityscapes of West India. By the end of the century, Parsis had augmented that number tenfold. Many of these structures were erected in what they dubbed the “Persian Style,” on floor plans described as “open.” From the 1830s to the 1930s, the Persian Revival style evolved simultaneously and codependently in two different geo-cultures: the western coast of the Indian subcontinent, with large Parsi urban populations, as in Bombay and Surat, and the major cities of Qajar and Pahlavi Iran, in particular Shiraz and Tehran. These were interpretative “copies” of “originals,” not necessarily of archeological sites but European and native fantastical travelogues as “authentic” sources. Parsi patrons negotiated the currents of postcolonial identity through a unique conception of good taste. Architecture quite literally stabilized and grounded in solid foundations the uncertainty of in-between identities: while their Persian Revival secured Parsi identity in a historicist footing, their Gothic Revival spoke demonstrably to the modern progress made by them. The emancipatory possibilities of architecture provided seemingly aloof public facades that aimed to convey explicit ethical and aesthetic values.
Talinn Grigor is professor and chair of the Art History Program in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on 19th- to 21st-century art and architectural histories through the framework of postcolonial and critical theories, grounded in Iran and Parsi India. Her books include Building Iran: Modernism, Architecture, and National Heritage under the Pahlavi Monarchs (2009); Contemporary Iranian Art: From the Street to the Studio (2014); and The Persian Revival: The Imperialism of the Copy in Iranian and Parsi Architecture (Penn State Univ. Press, 2021).
