Recorded: May 30, 2019
Event: Ancient Iran and the Classical World, An International Symposium
Citation: Gulácsi, Zsuzsanna. "Dura from the East: Iranian Impact on the Formation of Religious Arts across the Trade Routes of the Asian Continent during the 3rd–6th Centuries CE," Ancient Iran and the Classical World, An International Symposium. May 30, 2019
by Zsuzsanna Gulácsi (Northern Arizona University)
About the Speaker
Zsuzsanna Gulácsi is a historian of Asian religious art specializing in the contextualized art historical study of pan-Asiatic religions that adapted their arts to a variety of cultures as they spread throughout the continent. He received a double major Ph.D. degree (1998) from Indiana University, Bloomington, in Central Eurasian studies (Old Uygur) and art history (Asian Art); and the equivalent of a double major MA degree (1990) from Loránd Eötvös University, Budapest, in historical ethnography and Turkic studies. His teaching career began at Sophia University in Tokyo in Japan, where he was a tenured assistant professor of Central Asian and Buddhist Art history (1999-2003). Since 2003, he has been teaching at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, where he was tenured in 2006 and promoted to the rank of a professor in 2012.
The bulk of his work so far has focused on the visual arts of a now extinct missionary world religion, Manichaeism, that existed in phases between the mid 3rd and the early 17th century across Asia. Having been trained in the discipline of art history, he knew from the start that Manichaean art was rarely studied by art historians. It was a much-neglected, but promising field. Therefore, he began to follow standard art historical methodology in his publications with the goal to ready Manichaean visual sources to be considered at the same level with the better-known and more-studied arts of other religious traditions.