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Abbasi Program welcomes Professor Blessing

Patricia Blessing

The Abbasi Program warmly welcomes Dr. Patricia Blessing, who has joined Stanford University this fall as an Associate Professor of Art and Art History.

Patricia Blessing specializes in the art and architecture of the Islamic world, with a focus on the Eastern Mediterranean from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. Her teaching interests include the multi-sensory experience of spaces and objects; medieval and early modern Islamic architecture; the politics of urban space in the modern Middle East; heritage preservation and Islamic archaeology; and style as a tool of art historical investigation.

Patricia was previously Assistant Professor of Islamic Art History in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University, where she received her PhD in 2012.

Professor Blessing is the author of Rebuilding Anatolia after the Mongol Conquest: Islamic Architecture in the Lands of Rūm, 1240–1330 (Ashgate, 2014) and Architecture and Material Politics in the Fifteenth-century Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2022). With Elizabeth Dospel Williams and Eiren Shea, she co-authored Medieval Textiles across Eurasia, c. 300-1400 for the Cambridge Elements series Global Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Blessing’s work has been supported by the ANAMED Research Center for Anatolian Cultures, the Barakat Trust, the British Academy, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the International Center of Medieval Art, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and the Society of Architectural Historians.

You can follow Professor Blessing on Twitter at @pdblessing .