I have just received the proofs for my essay “Ancient Iranian Art: From Grand Narratives to Local Perspectives,” which will be published in Testing the Canon of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology, edited by Amy Gansell and Ann Shafer (Oxford University Press), sometime this winter. I’m even getting a couple of color images for my essay, which is very exciting.
I have a great fondness for this essay because it was the first thing I wrote that made me feel explicitly like a scholar of ancient Iran, and not just a peripheral classicist (though I still feel like a peripheral classicist). In many respects it marked my transition from working on Egypt to working on Iran, though of course I continue to produce scholarship on Achaemenid Egypt (I agreed to another one yesterday). This essay also helped me to get my current position at the Met, for which I am enormously grateful, and it informs the work I do every day on the planning for the re-installation of the Ancient Near Eastern galleries.
So buy the book! I’ll tell you how when it’s published.