Matthew P. Canepa

Biography

Matthew P. Canepa is Professor and Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Presidential Chair in Art History and Archaeology of Ancient Iran at the University of California, Irvine. An elected fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and former Guggenheim fellow, Canepa is the author of numerous publications including The Iranian Expanse: Transforming Royal Identity through Architecture, Landscape, and the Built Environment, 550 BCE–642 CE (2018), winner of the James R. Wiseman Award from the Archaeological Institute of America in 2020, and The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual of Kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran (2009), recipient of the American Historical Association’s 2010 James Henry Breasted Award. His most recent volume is entitled Persian Cultures of Power and the Entanglement of the Afro-Eurasian World (Getty, 2024). While affiliated with Wolfson he will work on a project focusing on the intersection of power, materiality the somatic contestation of imperially useful elite subjectivities in Iran, Central Asia, India, and the Mediterranean after Alexander with a focus on a (surprisingly) understudied and under-theorized material and epigraphic corpus: precious metal vessels from Seleucid and Arsacid Iran, and the Hellenistic Far East.

Research Interests
Archaeology; Iranian Studies; Hellenistic World