Academic | The Cambridge Shahnama Centre for Persian Studies

Dr Firuza Melville

Director of Research

Dr Firuza Melville is a graduate (hons.) of St Petersburg University, where she received her PhD in Persian Literature, Art and Islamic Studies, and taught until 2005. After a term in Ann Arbor as a Fulbright Professor and a term in Princeton, in the Institut for Advanced Study, she left St Petersburg as an Associate Professor for Oxford where she was teaching Persian literature at the Faculty of Oriental Studies. Dr Melville was also a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford where she was Tutor, Supervisor and Director of Studies for all undergraduate and graduate students reading Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Egyptian, Armenian, and Syriac, as well as Curator of the Ferdawsi Library and the Persian manuscript collection. In 2010 she moved to Cambridge as Iran Heritage Foundation Research Fellow at Pembroke College. Since 2013 she is Director of Research of the Cambridge Shahnameh Centre for Persian Studies. She has been AMES Director of Studies in Pembroke College, Peterhouse and Corpus Christi.

Her research interests include mediaeval Persian book art, Persian literature, contemporary Iranian art, Russian cultural Orientalism in Central Asia and the Caucasus, especially in literature, visual art, opera and ballet, and the history of Russo-Persian diplomacy of the early Qajar period

Ünver Rüstem

Ünver Rüstem specialises in the art and architecture of the Islamic world, with a focus on the Ottoman Empire in its later centuries. He is particularly interested in East-West intersections and interactions, and his BA and MA, both from the University of London (SOAS and UCL), were jointly in Islamic and European art history. He earned his doctorate at Harvard University, where he wrote a dissertation on the architectural transformation of eighteenth-century Istanbul, a project for which he was awarded a Junior Fellowship at Istanbul's Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations. Before coming to Cambridge, he was a Mellon Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow and Lecturer at Columbia University.

Theresa Zischkin

Theresa is an Art History graduate of the University of St Andrews, where her master's dissertation argued that the visual idioms in the Timurid Mi'rajnama shape religious space and won a prize at the Symposia Iranica in 2019. She is currently pursuing a PhD at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich under the supervision of Dr Ilse Sturkenboom, focusing on the figural marginalia in the Muraqqa-e Gulshan. As research assistant, she was teaching an undergraduate seminar about the image in Islamic art in the summer term of 2022. Her focus is on the Persianate arts of the book, and she enjoys working at the Shahnama Centre, being mainly involved with the Shahnama Project's database since February 2022.

As a consultant of the Shahnama Project, Theresa is updating the database, locating files and images, as well as checking entries or lines in the Shahnama. She has also been working for an art dealer of medieval and folk art since 2013 and has recently joined an auction house in Vienna, due to her particular fondness of object-based approaches and handling of a variety of objects. In the future, Theresa hopes to be involved with museums, libraries, and other art-related institutions particularly in the field of Islamic arts.