Talinn Grigor

Talinn Grigor is a Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of California, Davis. Her research concentrates on the cross-pollination of art and (post)colonial politics, focused on Iran and India. Her first book, Building Iran: Modernism, Architecture, and National Heritage under the Pahlavi Monarchs (Prestel, 2009) examines the link between official architecture and heritage discourses in 20th-century Iran. Contemporary Iranian Visual Culture and Arts: Street, Studio, and Exile (Reaktion, 2014) explores Iranian visual culture through the premise of the art historical debate of populist versus avant-garde art that extends into the identity politics of the exile. A co-edited book with Sussan Babaie, entitled Persian Kingship and Architecture: Strategies of Power in Iran from the Achaemenids to the Pahlavis (I.B. Tauris, 2015), investigates the architectural legitimization of royal power through Iran’s long history. Her articles have appeared in the Art Bulletin,Getty Research Journal, Third Text, Journal of Iranian Studies, Thresholds, and DOCOMOMO among others. Past grants and fellowships include the Getty Research Institute, Cornell University, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Soudavar Memorial Foundation, the Soros Foundation, the Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute and the Aga Khan at MIT. Her present project deals with the turn-of-the-century European art-historiography and its links to revivalism in Qajar Iran and the British Raj.