- Assistant Professor, Art History
- Email: rwrightson@uri.edu
- Office Location: Pastore Hall 318
Biography
Dr. Rebecca Wrightson is an Assistant Professor of Global Pre-Modern Art in the Department of Art and Art History. She completed her B.A. in Art History at the University of Rhode Island and received her M.Sc. from the University of Edinburgh. She went on to earn her D.Phil. in Islamic Art and Architecture from the Khalili Research Centre at the University of Oxford. Before joining the faculty at URI, she held the Kluger Postdoctoral Fellowship in Fine Arts at Trinity College, Hartford and an Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University. In addition to her academic career, she worked as the collections manager of the former John Woodman Higgins Armory Museum and an assistant registrar at the Worcester Art Museum.
Her courses focus on the connectivity of the ancient and medieval worlds, investigating mobility, trade, and migration involving diverse peoples, technologies, and objects. Her particular teaching interests focus on the regions surrounding the Mediterranean, including Europe, West Asia, and North Africa.
Research
Dr. Wrightson’s interest in medieval and Islamic art began as an undergraduate at the University of Rhode Island, where she wrote an honors thesis on the art and architecture of Norman Sicily. She continued her study of the cultural complexities of the medieval world at the University of Edinburgh, where she completed her masters in the Arts of the Global Middle Ages. She then expanded her research interests as a doctoral student at the University of Oxford into early Islamic art. Her D.Phil. thesis, entitled “Legibility, Visual Ambiguity, and the Patterning of Arabic Script: Epigraphic Ceramics of the Early Islamic World”, explores ceramic production during the ninth to eleventh centuries from Central Asia to the Iberian Peninsula, and the emergence of epigraphy as a formative element of ceramic decoration. Her work continues to examine ceramics of the early Islamic period, including the aestheticization of Arabic script, the intersection of text and material culture, the socio-economic implications of ceramics as an artistic medium, and the transmission of epigraphic traditions and ceramic technologies.
Education
- D.Phil., University of Oxford, 2022
- M.Sc., University of Edinburgh, 2015
- B.A., University of Rhode Island, 2012
Selected Publications
“’What’s in a Name?’: Signatures on Luster Ceramics of Ninth- and Tenth-Century Southern Mesopotamia.” Muqarnas (forthcoming).
“The Other Half: Reconstructing the Context of Epigraphic Ceramics in the Early Islamic World.” In Expanding Contexts, Shifting Horizons: New Studies in Islamic Art and Architecture. Brill, forthcoming.
“The Epigraphic Samarra Horizon: Blue-on-White Ceramics.” In Inscriptions of the Medieval Islamic World, edited by Bernard O’Kane, A.C.S. Peacock, and Mark Muehlhaeusler, 363–88. Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Art. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023.