Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Research Fellow Moujan Matin joined the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations in January 2020. Her DPhil thesis, “Revisiting the Origins of Islamic Glazed Pottery: A Technological Examination of 8th-10th Century Ceramics from Islamic Lands,” focused on the development of tin-opacified glazed ceramics based on the study of sherds from sites in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. After completing her DPhil, she was awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, University of Oxford (2016-2019), to work on the project Hearing the Footsteps of Genghis Khan: Technological Changes in the Production of Stonepaste Ceramics from Iran, Syria and Egypt. The aim of this project was to understand further the processes that led to a technological boom at a time of significant social and political turmoil after the Mongol invasions in the Middle East. As part of this project, Moujan undertook fieldwork at Moshkin Tepe, Iran. After this fellowship, she served as an invited research fellow at the Sun Yat-Sen (Zhongshan) University, Guangzhou, China, to participate in the Nanhai I Shipwreck project.
Areas of Interest
- Ceramics of the Islamic World
- Intersections between Art and sciences in the Middle East
- History of science and technology in the Middle East
- Ethnography of technology in Iran
- Pigments
Education
DPhil, University of Oxford (2017)
