PMA Leadership & Team

Dr Shiva Mihan (President)
The British Museum

Dr Shiva Mihan is Curator of Islamic Collections (Persianate World) at the British Museum. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2018, and her dissertation, Timurid Manuscript Production: The Scholarship and Aesthetics of Prince Baysunghur’s Royal Library (1420–1435), was awarded the Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies in 2019. She has held curatorial and academic positions at leading institutions, including a postdoctoral fellowship as Curator of Islamic Art at the Harvard Art Museums (2018–2020) and a subsequent fellowship in Islamic Art at the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. She has also taught Islamic art as a visiting professor at Washington University in St Louis. Mihan’s research centres on the history of Islamic manuscript production, artistic patronage, and the transmission of texts in the Persianate world. She is the Director and founding President of the Persian Manuscripts Association.

Dr Michael Chagnon
Aga Khan Museum

Dr Michael Chagnon is a Curator at the Aga Khan Museum since 2019, specialising in the arts of the book from the early modern Persianate sphere. He has curated numerous acclaimed exhibitions, most recently Rumi: A Visual Journey through the Life and Legacy of a Sufi Poet (2023). He has previously held curatorial posts at the Brooklyn Museum, LACMA, Japan Society, New-York Historical Society and Asia Society Museum. He is also Assistant Professor in the Departments of Art History and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto. Among his recent publications are the catalogue of the Rumi exhibition and essays “Riza ‘Abbasi and the Embedded Image”, “Interpreting a Later Safavid Vase: Between Material, Object, and Image”. Dr. Chagnon received his PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2015.

Dr Bruno De Nicola
Austrian Academy of Sciences

Bruno De Nicola is Distinguished Researcher at the Institute of Iranian Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Since 2020 he is the Principal Investigator in the FWF START- Prize project NoMansLand, “Nomads’ Manuscripts Landscape”. He has formerly held positions at the University of St Andrews and Goldsmiths College (University of London). He has published two monographs, Women in Mongol Iran: The khātūns, 1206–1335 (with EUP, in 2017) and more recently The Chobanids of Kastamonu: Politics, patronage and religion in 13th century Anatolia (with Routledge, 2024). He has published several articles and book chapters on the history of the Mongol Empire, pre-modern history of Iran, Anatolia and Central Asia and manuscript studies.

Ms Yasmin Faghihi
Cambridge University Library

Is the Head of the Near and Middle Eastern manuscripts and printed collections at the Cambridge University Library. She has worked extensively on the Digital Humanities approaches to manuscript research. She is the chair of FIHRIST, the online union catalogue of manuscripts from the Islamicate World and a research affiliate of Cambridge Digital Humanities (CDH).

Dr Richard McClary
University of York

Dr Richard Piran McClary is a senior lecturer in Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of York, where he has lectured extensively on a range of subjects related to medieval Islamic art and architecture around the world. He received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2015, before he became a Leverhulme Trust Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, examining the surviving corpus of Qarakhanid architecture in Central Asia.

Among his long list of publications I can mention Rum Seljuq Architecture 1170-1220: The Patronage of Sultans in 2017, Medieval Monuments of Central Asia: Qarakhanid Architecture of the 11th and 12th Centuries in 2020 and his latest monograph, on mina’i ware, in 2024, all with Edinburgh University Press. He has served as a trustee and the Research Director for the British Institute of Persian Studies and is co-founder and managing editor of the Journal of Islamic Art and Architecture, which was officially launched in Oxford last week.

Prof. Andrew Peacock
University of St Andrews

Prof. Andrew Peacockis a professor of history at the University of St. Andrews, specialising in the histories of the Seljuk Empire and Ottoman Empire. He is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and a Fellow of the British Academy. His numerous publications include a 2025 edited volume Iran and Persianate Culture in the Indian Ocean World and published with Bloomsbury Publishing 2025), and Court and Cosmos: The Great Age of the Seljuqs with the late Sheila Canby, published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2016.

Prof. Sabine Schmidtke
Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton

Dr Jochen Sokoly
The Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar

Prof. Jochen Sokoly is Professor of Art History of the Islamic World at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar. His research focuses on the material culture of the Early Islamic caliphates, particularly the context of court, administration and manufacture. He has published on early Islamic inscribed textiles, and curated exhibitions on contemporary Middle Eastern art. He has held fellowships at AKPIA Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Royal Ontario Museum, and has served as a member of Council of the Royal Asiatic Society, London. He received his PhD from the University of Oxford. Among his many publications, to mention a few:

Textiles of the Early Islamic Caliphates. Dar al-Athar Al-Islamiyyah and Thames and Hudson in 2025.

Social Fabrics: Inscribed Textiles from Medieval Egyptian Tombs. (with Mary McWilliams) published with the Harvard Art Museums and Yale University Press, in 2022. And in 2011 with Allison Ohta. India: East / West: the age of discovery in Late Georgian India, as seen through the collections of the Royal Asiatic Society.