Talinn Grigor

Associate Professor of Fine Arts

Departments/Programs

Fine Arts

Degrees

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ph.D.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, M.Arch.
University of Southern California, B.A.

Expertise

Modern & Contemporary Architecture
(post)Colonial & Critical Theory
Islamic Art & Architecture

Profile

Talinn Grigor (Ph.D., MIT, 2005) is an Associate Professor of modern and contemporary architecture in the Department of Fine Arts at Brandeis University. Her research concentrates on the cross-pollination of architecture and (post)colonial politics, focused on Iran and India. Her first book, Building Iran: Modernism, Architecture, and National Heritage under the Pahlavi Monarchs (Prestel, 2009) examines the link between official architecture and heritage discourses in 20th-century Iran. Contemporary Iranian Art: From the Street to the Studio (Reaktion, 2014) explores Iranian visual culture through the premise of the art historical debate of populist versus avant-garde art that extends into the identity politics of the exile. A co-edited book with Sussan Babaie, entitled Persian Kingship and Architecture: Strategies of Power in Iran from the Achaemenids to the Pahlavis (I.B. Tauris, 2015), investigates the architectural legitimization of royal power through Iran’s long history. Her articles have appeared in the Art Bulletin, Getty Research Journal, Third Text, Journal of Iranian Studies, Thresholds, and DOCOMOMO among others. Past grants and fellowships include the Getty Research Institute, Cornell University, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Soudavar Memorial Foundation, the Soros Foundation, the Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute and the Aga Khan at MIT. Her present project deals with the turn-of-the-century European art-historiography and its links to eclectic-revivalistic architecture in Qajar Iran and the British Raj.

Awards and Honors

Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute, book subvention (2014)

The Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation (2014)

Center for German and European Studies Research (2013)

Social Science Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship for Transregional Research (2012 - 2013)

Visiting Scholar at the Center for Near Eastern Studies, University of California Los Angeles (2012)

Soudavar Memorial Foundation, subvention for Persian Kingship, London & Geneva (2010 - 2012)

Theodore and Jane Norman Fund, subvention for Contemporary Art, Brandeis University (2010 - 2011)

Tomberg Research Funds, Brandeis University (2010 - 2011)

Soudavar Memorial Foundation, book subvention (2009)

Tomberg Research Funds, Brandeis University (2009)

Getty Research Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship (2008 - 2009)

Scott Opler Emerging Scholar Fellowship, Society of Architectural Historians (2007)

Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Cornell University (2005 - 2006)

Honorable Mention for Best Dissertation, Foundation for Iranian Studies (2005)

Fellow for Excellence in Persian Studies, Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute (2003)

Ittleson Predoctoral Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art (2003 - 2005)

Historians of Islamic Art, travel grant (2002)

American Institute of Iranian Studies research grant (2000)

Aga Khan Grant, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1998 - 2004)

Scholarship

Grigor, Talinn. "Kings and Traditions in Différance: Antiquity Revisited in post-Safavid Iran." The Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture. Ed. Gulru Necipoglu and Barry Flood. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015 (forthcoming)

Grigor, Talinn. "Tehran: A Revolution in Making." The Political Landscapes of Capitals. Ed. Jessica Christie and Jelena Bogdanovic. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2015 (forthcoming)

Grigor, Talinn & Sussan Babaie, eds. Persian Kingship and Architecture: Strategies of Power in Iran from the Achaemenids to the Pahlavis. London: I.B. Tauris, 2015.

Grigor, Talinn. "What Art Does: Methodological Privileging of Agency and Art History’s Global Dispute in 1901." In the Wake of the Global Turn: Propositions for an ‘Exploded’ Art History without Borders. Ed. Jill Casid and Aruna D’Souza. Williamstown, Mass.: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2014. 126-42.

Grigor, Talinn. Contemporary Iranian Art: From the Street to the Studio. London: Reaktion Books, 2014.

Grigor, Talinn. "King’s White Walls: Modernism and Bourgeois Architecture." Culture and Cultural Politics under Reza Shah. Ed. Bianca Devos & Christoph Werner. London: Routledge, 2013. 95-118.

Grigor, Talinn. "Return of the Avant-garde to the Streets of Tehran." Iranian Nationalism Revisited. Ed. Kamran Aghai & Afshin Marashi. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. 235-54.

Grigor, Talinn. "Shifting Gaze: Iranian Architecture from Superpower to Semi-colony." Architecturalized Asia: Mapping the Continent through History. Ed. Ken Tadashi Oshima, Vimalin Rujivacharakul, Hazel Hahn, and Peter Christensen. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2013. 217-30.

Grigor, Talinn. Identity Politics in Irano-Indian Modern Architecture. Mumbai: The K.R. Cama Oriental Institute, 2013.

Grigor, Talinn. "Parsi Patronage of the Urheimat." Getty Research Journal 2. (2010): 53-68.

Grigor, Talinn. "Orientalism & Mimicry of Selfness: Archeology of the neo-Achaemenid Style." Les orientalismes en architecture à l'épreuve des savoirs archéologiques, historiques, techniques et artistiques. Ed. Nabila Oulebsir & Mercedes Volait. Paris: Editions Picard, 2009. 273-291.

Grigor, Talinn. Building Iran: Modernism, Architecture, and National Heritage under the Pahlavi Monarchs. New York: Periscope/Prestel, 2009.

Grigor, Talinn. "Orient oder Rom? Qajar 'Aryan' Architecture and Strzygowski's Art History." The Art Bulletin LXXXIX. 3 (2007): 562-590.

Grigor, Talinn. "Transient Constructs: Soviet Monuments & those of their 'Enemies'." Enemies of Empire: New Perspectives on Imperialism, Literature & History. Ed. Eóin Flannery & Angus Mitchell. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007. 113-129.

Grigor, Talinn. "Ladies, Last! Perverse Spaces in a Time of Orthodoxy." Thresholds 32. (2006): 53-56.

Grigor, Talinn. "The (inter)National of an Uneven Modernity: Architectural Politics in Pahlavi Iran." The DOCOMOMO Journal 35. (2006): 36-41.

Grigor, Talinn. "Preserving the Modern Antique: Persepolis `71." Future Anterior 2. 1 (2005): 22-29.

Grigor, Talinn. "Framing Modernit(ies): American Historians of Iranian Architecture, Phyllis Ackerman and Arthur Pope." ARRIS 15. (2004): 38-54.

Grigor, Talinn. "Recultivating 'Good Taste': the early Pahlavi Modernists and their Society for National Heritage." Journal of Iranian Studies 37. 1 (2004): 17-45.

Grigor, Talinn. "Of Metamorphosis: Meaning on Iranian Terms." Third Text 17. 3 (2003): 207-225.