Professor Robert Hillenbrand

Robert Hillenbrand was educated at the universities of Cambridge (English Literature; B.A. 1963) and Oxford (Oriental Studies; D.Phil. 1974). Between those dates he worked in the Administrative Class of the Civil Service in London and began to undertake research for his doctorate. He taught at the Department of Fine Art in the University of Edinburgh from 1971 and was awarded a chair of Islamic art there in 1989. His travels have taken him throughout the Islamic world. He has held visiting professorships at Princeton, University of California at Los Angeles, Bamberg, Dartmouth College, Beirut and Groningen. From 1992 to 2004 he held a short-term visiting professorship at Leiden. In 1993 he delivered the Kevorkian Lectures at New York University, and in 2004 he was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the American University in Cairo. He delivered the Runciman Lecture at King’s College, London, in 2010. Prof. Hillenbrand scholarly interests focus on Islamic architecture, painting and iconography. He work with the following languages: German (native speaker), French (excellent), Italian (reading knowledge), Spanish (reading knowledge), Persian (colloquial) and Arabic (for epigraphic purposes). He lectured in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, India, China, Japan, Russia, Canada, and throughout Europe and the United States.

Professor Robert Hillenbrand has written the following twelve books: Imperial Images in Persian Painting; Islamic Art and Architecture (translated into German and Turkish in 2005, Danish in 2008 and Persian in 2009; revised and expanded ed. 2021); The Architecture of Ottoman Jerusalem: An Introduction; Studies in Medieval Islamic Architecture (2 vols.); the prize-winning Islamic Architecture: Form, Function and Meaning (translated into Persian in 1998 and 2000); The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque; Studies in Islamic Painting; The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque. A landmark of modern Islamic architecture; Studies in the Islamic Decorative Arts; An unknown masterpiece from Mongol Iran; and Islamic Architecture in North Africa (co-author). In addition, he has edited seven books and co-edited five more. He also published some 190 articles on aspects of Islamic architecture and art.

In 2006 he was awarded the Book of the Year prize for The Visual Language of the Book of Kings. In 2008 he received the Iris Foundation Scholar’s Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Decorative Arts in New York. In 2013 he was appointed Ehrenmitglied (Honorary Member) of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft. In 2018 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Iranian Studies in California, and in 2019 he received, with his wife Carole, the Medal of the Royal Asiatic Society, the Society’s highest award, given periodically in recognition of outstanding contributions to the field of Asian studies.

A Festschrift for him appeared in 2005: The Iconography of Islamic Art. Studies in Honour of Robert Hillenbrand, ed. B. O’Kane, and a second two-volume Festschrift for him and his wife Carole, ed. M. Gibson and A. Ansari, is to be published in London by Gingko Press in April 2022. In 2006-7 he served as Director of the newly-established Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World, which comprises a consortium of the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester and Durham.

Professor Robert Hillenbrand was Slade Professor of Art at the University of Cambridge in 2008.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.