About Shiva Mihan

Shiva Mihan

Contributor for Iranian Studies

Shiva Mihan

Contributor for Iranian Studies

Shiva Mihan is the Schroeder Curatorial Fellow of Islamic Art at Harvard Art Museums. She catalogues and carries out in-depth research on collections of Islamic Art, with particular focus on manuscripts and dispersed folios. Her expertise are in manuscript production and patronage from the 14th to the 19th century in Greater Iran. She also works on exhibitions and installations of light-sensitive objects from ‘Islamicate’ lands.

Before joining the Harvard Art Museums, she was a fellow at King’s College, Cambridge University, where she conducted research on the Pote Collection of Islamic Manuscripts, and made some 600 codices accessible online on the Union Catalogue of Manuscripts from Islamicate World (Fihrist).

Shiva wrote her PhD dissertation at the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, on manuscript production in the first half of the 15th century under the patronage of the Timurid prince, Baysunghur (1399-1437), in Herat. Her dissertation “Timurid Manuscript Production: The Scholarship and Aesthetics of Prince Baysunghur’s Royal Library (1420-1435)”, was awarded the Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize for the ‘best Ph.D. dissertation’ by the British Society of Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) in 2019.

Her areas of interests include Islamic Art, manuscript production and art of the book, Persian literature, and Western contemporary art and architecture.