Conversation with Hyunjin Cho, PhD Candidate, History of Art & Architecture
Interview with Hyunjin Cho
Dissertation Project: “Illustrated Manuscripts of Firdausi’s Shahnama in Nineteenth-Century Iran”
What is the subject of your dissertation?
My general area of research is Islamic art with a specialization in the arts of the book in 19th-century Iran. In my dissertation, I focus on one literary text, an epic poem called the Shahnama or Book of Kings by Firdausi (d. 1020). The epic poem retells various stories of ancient Persian kings and heroes—some legendary and mythical and some historical—and takes the reader on a wonderful journey filled with battles, courtly festivities, romances, dramas, and mythical animals, such as simurgh. Over time, Firdausi’s Shahnama became the most frequently illustrated Persian text; the earliest extant illustrated copy of the epic dates to the early 14thcentury and illustrated manuscripts of the Shahnama continued to be made in 19th-century Iran.
The Shahnama has been the subject of much study. After all, the Shahnama occupies a special place in the cultural fabric of the Persianate world and is widely popular and versatile both as a written text and oral tradition (an example of such oral performances can be found here). However, existing scholarship tends to overlook 19th-century illustrated manuscripts of the poem. Why 19th-century Islamic visual culture, including the illustrated Shahnama manuscripts I examine in my own dissertation project, have remained understudied can be partially explained by how “Islamic art” has been defined and periodized in English-language survey texts, which rarely cover works made after 1800. This issue has been critically explored by Islamic art historians, including Dr. Margaret Graves and Dr. Finbarr Barry Flood. This chronological cut-off isn’t arbitrary at all. Rather, it perpetuates the “decline” narrative of Islamic visual culture claiming that works arts made after 1800 lack authenticity and tradition due to increased use and adoption of European visual modes and motifs. The germ of my project was a historiographic exercise I developed as an MA candidate. I wanted to challenge this idea that arts of 19th-century Iran actually embodied “decline.”
How did the onset of the pandemic affect your research plans?
The heart of my project involves the examination of multiple illustrated versions of the Shahnama as well as thinking about the artistic and cultural networks these objects once formed. I am interested in the image-text relationships and fascinated with how these manuscript paintings both deliberately pause the reader to contemplate certain verses while also propeling the reader from one page to another. One challenge I faced even prior to COVID-19 was that Shahnama manuscripts central to my project are scattered all over the world, an unfortunate result of the 20th century art market. In January 2020, I had the privilege of being the recipient of a BU Graduate Research Abroad Fellowship (GRAF). I planned to use the funds to visit museums and libraries where these various 19th-century illustrated copies of the Shahnama are now housed: London, Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Venice, and St. Petersburg.
Unfortunately—and this has since become one of my favorite COVID-19 stories to share—my flight to London was canceled two days before departure. Like many others, life has changed immeasurably for me since then. Unable to spend time actually reviewing manuscripts in museums and archives, I have had little choice but to rely on digitized images. Unlike art historians who work with large in-situ monuments that can only be reviewed physically, I have been fortunate that my own sources—illustrated manuscripts—are amenable to being photographed. Digitization is no panacea, however. For example, the British Library in London is the repository of many manuscripts that I want to analyze. Only a few of my core objects have been currently digitized. I was lucky to get one of my requests through in the fall of 2020 considering that the British Library digitization team was overwhelmed with similar requests from numerous researchers in the same postion as me. The cost of digitization was considerable. Fortunately, I have gotten some relief from organizations including the Graduate Student Organization that has generously made available some of its travel grant funds to cover lockdown-induced research expenses such as digitization.
Has reliance on digitized images altered your research project?
The structure of the project has remained substantially the same. When I am able to, I still plan to go and see some of the manuscripts that I have only examined digitally. While there is no good alternative to the in-person examinations, digitization has helped me magnify and fine tune two objectives of the project—both of which hopefully will help me highlight the artistic networks of these manuscripts. First, each manuscript that I am reviewing is unique and different. Yet, connections exist between them. Artists continuously repurposed and tweaked similar themes and motifs. Using digital humanities methods to methodically map these interconnections, I hope to highlight and make more explicit these continuities. Relying on data visualization tools to organize metadata from various books I hope to clarify exchanges and conversations that would otherwise have only been implicitly apparent. Second, this systematic collation and collective consideration of disparate Shahnama manuscripts can perhaps serve, in a small way, to undo the harm that was inflicted on these manuscripts by art dealers and collectors, who scattered the manuscripts far and wide. For example, in some cases collectors went as far as ripping out individual pages of folios from a single manuscript to sell each one separately to maximize profit. By building a digital database, which I aim to make available through open access, I will also be literally reassembling individual books that might only exist as lone folio pages in disparate museums.
What is Islamic Art?
This is a big question! And actually, the title of a recent, thought-provoking book by Dr. Wendy M. K. Shaw. I highly recommend it to anyone interested. What I can say, briefly, is that the term is both problematic and contested. For example, my project is not really about religion or Islam, although some of the key individuals in my dissertation may be associated with a major Sufi order in Shiraz or a community of Zoroastrians with connections in both Iran and India. Alternatives to the term “Islamic art” have been suggested, including “Islamicate art.” But whatever term or label we end up using, I think the object of Islamic art as a field is to understand and appreciate the arts produced, disseminated, and exchanged within the networks of people, ideas, and things brought forth by the rise and spread of Islam over vast geographic areas and time.
Hyunjin was interviewed by Arthur George Kamya, April 2021.