بالنسبة للكثيرين منّا من المهتمين بالثقافة الماديّة، فإنّ الأشياء بحدّ ذاتها-بصرية كانت أو تُلمس أو حتّى التي تُشمّ- هي أساسيّة بقدر الحكايات التي ترويها.
Amanda Phillips
Amanda Phillips (DPhil, Oxon) is associate professor of Islamic art and material culture at the University of Virginia. She focuses on crafts—mostly textiles—made in the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period. Her first book, Everyday Luxuries (Berlin and Bönen, 2016), showed how men and women in Istanbul made, traded, and used art and objects, while also highlighting the abundance of goods from around the world available to anyone with ready cash. Her second book, Sea Change (Oakland, 2021), considers textiles from plain to fancy in a global perspective, highlighting the role of human agency in transfers of technology, patterns of consumption, the exchange of style, and the creation of taste. It also shows how evidence from objects intersects with written sources, often in unexpected and contradictory ways. Amanda teaches undergraduates and graduates, serves as the director of equity in the Art Department, and is beginning a new project about the global floral style of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.