Global Humanities Senior Research and Teaching Stay at Freie Universitaet Berlin

His field of study is Islamic culture, and Tawfiq Da’adli tackles it in an inter-disciplinary approach that combines the use of visual, archaeological and literary sources, with tools and insights taken from the fields of art history, poetics and anthropology. In his forthcoming book “The Pictorial Language of the Herat School of Painting: Two Nizami Manuscripts as a Case of Study,” he has focused on reading images, their messages and meanings, in their wider cultural and social context. In his current research, Tawfiq Da’adli is studying the representation of power of three important rulers: the Timurid Sultan Husayn Bayqara (r.1469-1506), the Safavid Shah-Tahmasp (r.1524-1576) and the Mughal emperor Akbar (r.1556-1605). In this study, he tries to answer such question: What were the ideological tendencies in the different courts? Which kind of struggles did the ruler face? And what was the relation between the ruler and the various social classes? Tawfiq Da’adli pays special attention to questions relating to artistic topoi and motifs and to the interplay between art and ideology in medieval Persian and Indian cultural traditions.

This year Tawfiq Da’adli joined the department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University. He was a Post-Doctoral research fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows for the last three years. In his graduate studies and his research career to date, he has developed expertise in the field of Islamic material culture throughout the medieval era. He worked in both, archaeology and art history: As an archaeologist, he conducted several excavations and surveys largely pertaining to the medieval period in Palestine. As an art historian, he has conducted research on Timurid illustrated manuscripts produced in Greater Iran and other art forms.