Eiren Shea Awarded €20,000 Grant to Host Berlin Conference

Aug 16, 2023

Eiren Shea's classroom, with a screen with textiles on the left corner.

Eiren Shea, associate professor of art history, has pursued research in the arts of the Mongol period, the Silk Road, China, Central Asia, and Persia. She will host the conference, “The Golden Horde: Art, Material Culture, and Architecture, 1227-1502,” which will examine the Golden Horde’s underexplored art and material culture.

Eiren Shea, associate professor of art history and chair of the East Asian studies concentration, was recently awarded a conference support grant of €20,000 from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, based in Cologne, Germany. The funds will support Shea and her colleagues Ittai Weinryb, from the Bard Graduate Center, and Qiao Yang, from the Max Planck Institute. Together, Shea and her colleagues will host a conference in Berlin, titled “The Golden Horde: Art, Material Culture, and Architecture, 1227-1502,” in December 2023. The conference will focus on the underexplored art and material culture of the Golden Horde, which was the western part of the once powerful Mongol empire. Despite the entity having controlled 25% of the world’s territory, the Golden Horde has been largely overlooked by scholars.

Eiren Shea, associate professor of art history and chair of the East Asian Studies Concentration, smiles. — *Eiren Shea, associate professor of art history and chair of the East Asian Studies Concentration.*

“I am very excited that this project is finally getting started since Professor Weinryb and I have been working on the idea of a Golden Horde project for a couple of years,” says Shea. “Our hope is that by bringing together a wide variety of international specialists on the arts, history, and culture of the Mongol period, we will be able to both fill in some of the gaps in English language scholarship on the Golden Horde, as well as contextualize the Golden Horde in the larger context of better studied areas of the Mongol Empire such as the Ilkhanate (in West Asia) and the Yuan dynasty (in China/Mongolia).”

Shea, in particular, has pursued research in the fields of textiles and arts across the world. Her book, Mongol Court Dress, Identity Formation, and Global Exchange, delves into the textiles and dress of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth and fourteenth century and investigates their impact on the arts in China, West Asia, and Europe. Shea’s main research encompasses the arts of the Mongol period, the Silk Road, China, Central Asia, and Persia, and has pursued textile research in museum and private collections in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and China. Shea also completed an intensive textile analysis course offered by the Centre International d’Étude des Textiles Anciens (CIETA) in Lyon. At Grinnell, she teaches courses such as, “Arts and Visual Cultures of China,” “The Mongol Century,” “Gender and Sexuality in East Asian Art,” and “Tutorial: Arts of the Silk Road.”

About the Fritz Thyssen Foundation

Founded on July 7, 1959, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation aims to promote research in history, language, and culture; state, economics, and society; and medicine and the natural sciences. The foundation funds research projects and conferences within these fields, as well as the publications of certain research findings supported by the foundation.

The goal of these national and international conferences is to facilitate discussion and analysis of academic inquiries while simultaneously fostering cooperation and networking of scholars within the same fields and interdisciplinary topics. Funding is provided for projects with a clear connection to German research systems. The Max Plank Institute, which operates numerous research institutes in Germany and abroad, will administer the conference support grant.