Sean Roberts Book Published by Yale Press
Sean Roberts, senior lecturer in Art History for the UT School of Art co-edited the book, The Environment and Ecology in Islamic Art and Culture, was just published by Yale University Press. The book is described in the following press release.
The Islamic world finds itself increasingly at the epicenter of our escalating climate emergency, both as a locus of the petrochemical industry and as home to extraordinary landscapes in which the effects of environmental transformation are acutely felt. Yet, far from a solely twenty-first-century concern, engagement with changing, and often extreme, natural conditions has long characterized Islamic art and architecture in the central Islamic lands and beyond into the Muslim diaspora. This new book brings together a diverse group of scholars and critics whose contributions address this profound ecological awareness through the dual lenses of Islamic culture and climate change. Their case studies range from the Gulf, Iraq, Syria, the Indian Subcontinent, North Africa, and even outer space. Contributors examine the optimistic, sustainable, and innovative responses adopted by artists and builders in the face of often irreversible and escalating environmental destruction that necessitates such ingenuity. Breaking traditional disciplinary boundaries, this timely book brings together a diverse range of perspectives to bear on this increasingly urgent problem.
Dr. Sean Roberts is a specialist in the arts of the pre-modern Mediterranean world. His research is concerned with the interactions of Europe and the Islamic lands, the cultural history of maps, and the place of printmaking in the histories of art and technology. His essays have appeared in journals including Renaissance Studies, Print Quarterly, The Journal of Early Modern History, and, most recently, Material Culture Review. He is the author of Printing a Mediterranean World: Florence, Constantinople and the Renaissance of Geography (Harvard, 2013) and the co-editor of Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Truman State/Penn State, 2013), and The Seas and the Mobility of Islamic Art (Yale, 2021). See more at: https://art.utk.edu/arthistory/roberts/