Contributors | 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 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.