Peyvand Firouzeh

This project explores the power of objects and knowledge in motion in the eastern Islamicate world. Set in fifteenth-century Deccan India under the Bahmanids, the region’s first independent Muslim dynasty from 1347 to 1528, the project focuses on the circulation of images and perceptions of the built environment that materialized temporal and geographical distance across the Indian Ocean. It examines how this circulation legitimized the dynasty by connecting it simultaneously to a pre-Islamic past and an Islamic present. Elucidating the history of an understudied region, traditionally considered a periphery of the Islamic world under Persian influence, the project’s interdisciplinary and transregional approach counterbalances this view by engaging with questions such as the interplay between politics and material culture, identity formation and migration, and the history of Islamicate societies in a global context.