Jaziran Metalwork, Astral Magic, and “the Golden Wand”

Dr Francesca Leoni is Curator of Islamic Art at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. She specialises in the Islamic Middle East with a focus on the Persian-speaking world. Her interests include book arts; cross-cultural exchanges between the Islamic world, Europe and Asia; the history and circulation of technologies; and contemporary art from the Middle East. She is also drawn to underrepresented or little-studied subjects including, more recently, occultism and divination. Dr Leoni looks at objects as points of departure and often uses them to pursue larger questions as well as to explore the broader cultural landscape that produced and consumed them. While she works on a range of media, her primary areas of expertise are illustrated and illuminated manuscripts and metalwork.