Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr Mira Xenia Schwerda - orcid.org/0000-0002-4208-4367
Postdoctoral Fellow, August 2022 - May 2023
Home Institution: University of Edinburgh
Dr Mira Xenia Schwerda is a historian of global modern art and visual culture, with a special focus on the Middle East, and a historian of print and photography. Her book manuscript-in-progress, tentatively titled Between Art and Propaganda: Photographing Revolution in Modern Iran (1905-1911), focuses on the imagery of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution and presents a new history of the visual narratives of political violence brought about by the triad of the telegraph, printing press, and photography. Her work interrogates the relationship between photography and politics and her publications include her article “Death on Display: Mirza Reza Kirmani, Prison Portraiture and the Depiction of Public Executions in Qajar Iran” (Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, vol. 8, issue 2-3 (2015), 172–191) and her essay “Iranian Photography: From the Court, to the Studio, to the Street” (in Mary McWilliams and David J. Roxburgh, eds., Technologies of the Image: Art in 19th-Century Iran, Cambridge/New Haven: Harvard Art Museums/Yale University Press, 2017, 81-106). Having received her PhD from Harvard in 2020, after completing a MA in the History of Art and Archaeology at Princeton and a Magister Artium in History and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Tübingen, she has previously worked at the Harvard Art Museums, where she curated the photography section of the exhibition Technologies of the Image: Art in 19th-Century Iran. Dr. Schwerda is also the co-editor of the journal Art in Translation, a founding member of Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, and the co-founder and co-convenor of the Virtual Islamic Art History Seminar Series.
Project Title: Constitutionalist Image Making: Photographing Revolution in the Modern Middle East
The history and the impact of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911), which resulted in the introduction of a constitution and a parliament, can only be fully understood from an interdisciplinary standpoint, bringing together political and social history, the study of art and visual culture, and Islamic and Middle Eastern studies. This first revolution, which is now overshadowed by the revolution of 1979, critically impacted the making of modern Iran as a nation state. Photography, which had become available and affordable to the general public for the first time through photographic picture postcards, played a crucial role in this process. Political news was circulated on these photographic picture postcards, complementing lithographed, illustrated newspapers and telegrams, while also playing a role in aesthetic and artistic changes, which led to a new kind of revolutionary portraiture. My book in-progress Between Art and Propaganda: Photographing Revolution in Modern Iran (1905-1911) foregrounds the people involved in this process—photographers, publishers, and politicians—who contributed to Constitutionalist image making and revolutionary portraiture.