Shiva Mihan’s research focuses on Islamic manuscript production and art of the Persianate lands, with a focus on art, patronage, and text transmission in 15th-century Iran under the Timurids. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 2018. Her dissertation, Timurid Manuscript Production: The Scholarship and Aesthetics of Prince Baysunghur’s Royal Library (1420-1435), was awarded the Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize for the best Ph.D. dissertation by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies in 2019. She was a postdoctoral curatorial fellow in Islamic Art at the Harvard University Art Museums from 2018 to 2020 and subsequently joined the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton as a Herodotus Fellow in Islamic Art at the School of Historical Studies. She is currently the founder and president of the Persian Manuscripts Association (PMA), an international academic organization dedicated to the support and promotion of research on Perso-Islamic manuscripts of the vast Persianate world. She is also the editor of Iranian studies for the Digital Orientalist Online Journal and editor of Middle Eastern Studies for a special issue in Digital Philology (Johns Hopkins University Press).
Her forthcoming book,“Patronage and Manuscript Production in Timurid Herat,” employs art historical interpretations in the context of history by highlighting the relationship between text and image, which emphasizes the previously neglected value of textual content of exquisite manuscripts. The book will look at the manuscript corpus produced at the celebrated library of bibliophile Prince Baysunghur in Herat during the first half of the 15th-century.