Patricia Blessing

Patricia Blessing specializes in the art and architecture of the Islamic world, with a focus on the eastern Mediterranean from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. Blessing’s first book, Rebuilding Anatolia after the Mongol Conquest: Islamic Architecture in the Lands of Rūm, 1240–1330 (Ashgate, 2014) argues that because patrons under Mongol rule architecture became bound to local building practices, rather than imperial or dynastic styles. Her second book, Architecture and Material Politics in the Fifteenth-century Ottoman Empire(Cambridge University Press, 2022) fundamentally reassesses Ottoman buildings in the long fifteenth century as expressions of artistic innovation and imperial politics. With Eiren L. Shea and Elizabeth Dospel Williams, Blessing co-authored Medieval Textiles across Eurasia, c. 300-1400 CE, in the Cambridge Elements series on the Global Middle Ages, (Cambridge University Press, 2023). With Richard P. McClary (University of York), she is working on the digital humanities project "Reimagining Royal Space: The Qilij Arslan II Kiosk in Konya as a Case Study for the Digital Reconstruction of Islamic Architecture”. A first overview of the project was published in Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 9.2 (Fall, 2022), https://doi.org/10.2979/tur.2022.a902178