Publication Highlight with Emine Fetvacı, The Album of the World Emperor

The Album of the World Emperor: Cross-Cultural Collecting and the Art of Album Making in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul examines an extraordinary piece of art: an album of paintings, drawings, calligraphy, and European prints compiled for the Ottoman sultan Ahmed I (r. 1603–17) by his courtier Kalender Paşa (d. 1616). In this detailed study of one of the most important works of seventeenth-century Ottoman art, Norma Jean Calderwood Professor of Islamic and Asian Art Emine Fetvacı uses the album to explore questions of style, iconography, foreign inspiration, and the very meaning of the visual arts in the Islamic world. Guests are welcome to join Inaugural Robert L. and Judith T. Winston Director Nancy Netzer in asking questions of the author to learn more.

Free; open to the public; to register for this talk, visit https://tinyurl.com/y4g9j7rz.

Emine Fetvacı is the Norma Jean Calderwood University Professor in Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College. She is the author of Picturing History at the Ottoman Court (Indiana University Press, 2013), which was awarded the 2014 M. Fuat Köprülü Book Prize by the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, and The Album of the World Emperor: Cross-Cultural Collecting and Album Making at the Ottoman Court (Princeton University Press, 2019), nominated for the 2021 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award by the College Art Association. Fetvacı is also the editor, with Erdem Çipa, of Writing History at the Ottoman Court (IUP, 2013). Among other venues, her articles have appeared in the Art Bulletin, Ars Orientalis, and Muqarnas. She has held a Stanford University Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship as well as been a member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.