Lamia Balafrej’s teaching and research explore the arts of the Islamic world, from Morocco to Iran. Her forthcoming work includes a monograph on technical marvels in medieval Islam, a short book on the slave-machine from a transhistorical perpective, and a co-edited volume, Ethnicity and Race in Medieval Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Early findings have appeared in articles on the black box and racialization (2026), gender, slavery, and technology (2023), automated courtly slaves (2022), and domestic slavery and skin color (2021).
Her first book, The Making of the Artist in Late Timurid Painting (Edinburgh University Press, 2019, also available on jstor), explored Persian painting’s labor-intensive intricacy, prompting her interest in the body as technology. Essays and book chapters have 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 research has also shaped her teaching. Graduate seminars have examined such topics as labor, technology, and instruments, deserts and arid landscapes, and minorities in the Middle East and North Africa. Undergraduate courses emphasize transregional, Mediterranean, and global perspectives, visual and material culture as historical evidence, as well as the arts and sciences of 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 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.
Selected Links & Public Talks
- Race and Ethnicity in Northwest Africa, Across Two Seas, a symposium at Rice University, Oct. 2026.
- Technical Marvels and the Making of Difference, Tomàs Harris Lectures at UCL, March 2026.
- The Medieval Instrumentality of AI, talk at the Courtauld, Dec. 2025.
- The Politics of Automata, talk at Penn, Nov. 2025.
- I Tatti Berenson Fellowship, 2026.
- CSW Faculty Research Grant, 2025–26.
- On Medieval Talismans, talk at Rice, March 2025.
- Slave Clocks and Figuration, talk at Stanford, Nov. 2024.
- Race Before Algorithms, talk at Berkeley, Oct. 2024.
- Premodern Slave Clocks, talk at Cornell, Oct. 2023.
- Machinic Jawari, talk at ASU, Oct. 2023.
- Rome Prize Fellowship, 2022–23.
- Getty Research Institute Scholarship, 2023.
- Podcast or Perish: Lamia Balafrej, June 2020.
