Finbarr Barry Flood is founder-director of Silsila: Center for Material Histories & William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the Humanities, Institute of Fine Arts and Department of Art History, New York University. His current research focuses on the reception of concepts, materials and practices originating in the central Islamic lands in regions that lay beyond, whether the Caucasus, the Horn of Africa, or the Indian Ocean.
His publications highlight the potential of material culture to nuance histories of premodern transcultural or transregional connectivity in ways that challenge their instrumental use in essentialist politics of the present. They include Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter (Princeton University Press, 2009), Technologies de dévotion dans les arts de l’islam: pèlerins, reliques, copies (Musée du Louvre/Hazan, 2019) and Tales Things Tell: Material Histories of Early Globalisms, coauthored with Beate Fricke, University of Bern (Princeton University Press, forthcoming,
2023).
His contribution to the CallFront project concerns methodological and theoretical questions arising from the analysis of scripts and writing styles developed on the ‘margins’ of established canons, with a particular focus on the relationship between materiality and meaning.