The Cambridge Shahnama Centre for Persian Studies

Theresa is an Art History graduate of the University of St Andrews, where her master’s dissertation on the Timurid Miʿrājnāma received a prize at the Symposia Iranica in 2019. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich under the supervision of Dr Ilse Sturkenboom, focusing on stencilled paper from Central Asia, Greater Iran, and Mughal India. As a research assistant, she taught two undergraduate seminars on Islamic art in 2022 and 2023.
In 2022, she greatly enjoyed her time at the Shahnama Centre, where she was primarily involved with the Shahnama Project’s database. As a consultant for the project, she updated the database, located files and images, and verified entries and verses in the Shāhnāma.
Theresa spent ten years working with an Austrian art dealer specialising in medieval and folk art, and in 2022 joined an auction house in Vienna. She has a particular fondness for object-based approaches and the close handling of diverse artworks. In the future, she hopes to work with museums, libraries, and other art institutions, especially within the field of Islamic arts.