Selin Unluonen

Selin Ünlüönen is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art and Design at Pratt Institute. She is a scholar of Islamic art interested in the book history and court cultures of Iran and the Ottoman Empire. Her research investigates how manuscripts shape the communities that commission, make, and read them.

She is currently working on a book, The Khamsa of Shah Tahmasp: An Object Biography. During the first half of the sixteenth century, Iranian monarchs commissioned some of the most richly illustrated manuscripts in the history of Islamic art in response to intense political and religious turmoil. Against the prevailing tendency to read these illustrations as expressions of a royal patron’s tastes and whims, this project asks what these paintings did for the larger society of courtiers, artists, and viewers. Taking as a case study a celebrated manuscript of Nizami’s Khamsa (ca. 1540s), the project begins at the Safavid court and follows the book through its eventual removal to England. Along the way, it traces how the manuscript acquired the capacity to address and transform its viewers—and how that capacity was eventually curtailed. The Khamsa of Shah Tahmasp reveals the conditions and limits of a book’s agency.

Ünlüönen has also published on representations of epigraphy in Islamic paintings, Ottoman alphabet books, and nineteenth-century royal libraries of Iran. Her co-translations of Tanpınar have appeared in the PMLA.

Prior to joining Pratt, Ünlüönen held fellowships at Oberlin College and Wesleyan University and taught writing at Princeton University. She is a Senior Fellow at the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. She has curated Islamic art exhibitions at the Yale University Art Gallery and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin.

Ph.D. History of Art, Yale University (2021)

M.A. History of Art, Yale University (2018)

B.A. Literature, Yale University (2014)

Peer-reviewed articles

“The Art and Ritual of Literacy: Alphabet Manuscripts at the Cusp of Ottoman Modernity,” Ars Orientalis 56 (2026). [Forthcoming]

“In a Double Bind between the Harem and the Museum: Institutionalizing a Book Collection in the Court of Nasir al-Din Shah,” The International Journal of Islamic Architecture 15:2 (2026), 315-339. View on IJIA; on Academia.edu.

“Between the Artist and the Patron: Painted Inscriptions of the Khamsa of Shah Ṭahmāsb,” in Inscriptions of the Medieval Islamic World, edited by Bernard O’Kane, A.C.S. Peacock and Mark Muehlhaeusler (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), 535-555. View on Jstor; on Academia.edu.

Reviews

Symposium review: “Writing/Curating the Middle East, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States, March 30–31, 2017,” International Journal of Islamic Architecture 7, no. 2 (2018): 397-399. View on IJIA; on Academia.edu.

Translations

Introduction to and translation of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s “Our Novel I&II,” with Shaj Mathew. [Forthcoming in PMLA]

Introduction to and translation of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s “Letter to a Young Girl in Antalya.” With Shaj Mathew. PMLA 138.2 (2023): 356-361. View on PMLA; on Academia.edu.

Public-facing work

“Qalam,” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, 2023.

“Appropriating Language, Appropriating the Great Church,” Aesthetics for Birds [contribution to a roundtable on Hagia Sophia’s conversion].

“A Nineteenth-century Alphabet Book from Ottoman Istanbul,” Visual Resources of the Middle East Project, 2020.