Dr. Chad Kia received his interdisciplinary Ph.D.in Islamic art, literature and intellectual history from Columbia University (2009). He has been a Smithsonian Fellow at the Freer and Sackler Galleries of Art in Washington and has taught Islamic art and Arabic and Persian literature at Harvard and Brown Universities. His book Art, Allegory and the Rise of Shiism in Iran, 1487-1565 is an iconographical study of Islamicate manuscript painting and mysticism during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.