Five College Renaissance Seminar with Yael Rice, Amherst College

Yael Rice (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) specializes in the art and architecture of South Asia and Greater Iran, with a particular focus on manuscripts and other portable arts of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. 

Rice's current research concerns physiognomic analysis as a courtly and artistic practice, Mughal depictions of imperial dreams, paintings made for the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707), and material and object encounters across the globe during the early modern period, the latter an interdisciplinary collaboration. She is also in the process of preparing a monograph entitled The Emperor’s Eye and the Painter’s Brush: Artists and Agency at the Mughal Court, based on her 2011 dissertation; and is co-editing an e-publication on the “life” of a Qur’an manuscript copied in Iran in the twelfth century. Her previous publications include studies of European engravings and Persian calligraphic specimens in Mughal royal albums, the 1598–99 Mughal Razmnama (Book of war), and an early fifteenth-century Khamsa (Quintet) of Nizami copied and illustrated in the region of Fars, Iran.