Lamia Balafrej

Lamia Balafrej’s teaching and research explore the arts of the Middle East and North Africa through time. She is currently completing three book projects. One is a study of wondrous devices from automata to talismans in relation to issues of labor and difference in medieval Islam. A second project, The Dependent Machine, offers a conceptual and transhistorical analysis of the slave-machine analogy, considered as an epistemological grounding that has implications for AI as well. With Hannah Barker (ASU), she is also co-editing Ethnicity and Race in Medieval Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Early findings have appeared in articles on gender, slavery, and technology (2023), automated courtly slaves (2022), and domestic slavery and skin color (2021).

Prof. Balafrej’s interest in the relation of body and instrument grew out of her first book, The Making of the Artist in Late Timurid Painting (Edinburgh University Press, 2019, also available on jstor), where she explored Persian painting’s labor-intensive intricacy against Persianate notions of representation, medium, and authorship. Essays and book chapters have also considered the role of displaced artists in the circulation and remaking of manuscripts; the art of the poetic anthology in the Persianate world; the enmeshment of iconoclasm and iconophilia in the Islamicate world; and the presence of Islamic art in medieval Pisa.

Her interdisciplinary, wide-ranging interests have also shaped her teaching. Graduate seminars have examined such issues as: labor, technology, and instruments; deserts and arid landscapes; and minorities in the Middle East and North Africa. Undergraduate courses have emphasized transregional, Mediterranean, and global perspectives, new approaches to manuscript studies, book painting, and visual history, as well as intersections of arts and science in the Islamic world. 

Hailing from Morocco, Prof. Balafrej studied literature at the University Mohammed V (Rabat, Morocco) and is an alumna of the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris. She received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Aix-Marseille in 2013. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from various institutions, such as the I Tatti Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance, the American Academy in Rome, the Getty Research Institute, the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Institution.