Mehmet Aga-Oglu (24 August 1896 – 4 July 1949), was an Azerbaijani-Turkish Islamic art historian.

Born in Erivan, Russian Caucasia (today Armenia), Mehmet earned a doctorate history, philosophy, and Islamic languages from the University of Moscow.[1] By 1921 he was at the University of Istanbul, where he studied Islamic art and Ottoman history. Whilst in Berlin, Aga-Oglu would study under Dr. Ernst Herzfeld in Near Eastern architecture.[1]

In 1926 he earned a Ph.D. and in 1927 the Islamic Department of the National Museum in Istanbul appointed Mehmet as curator.[1] In 1929, Mehmet was appointed by Wilhelm Valentiner to develop the Department of Near Eastern Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts,[1] and published his first of several articles in the DIA Bulletin. [2] 1933, he was made chair of the History of Islamic Art at University of Michigan,[1] and was the first professor of Islamic art in the United States.[3] Aga-Oglu was the first editor of the scholarly journal Ars Islamica, beginning in 1934.[4] He would teach at the University of Michigan until 1938 as a Freer Fellow and Lecturer.[1] Mehmet Aga-Oglu died in 1949.[1]

Publications

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  • Persian Bookbindings of the Fifteenth Century, Mehmet Aga-Oglu, University of Michigan Press.
  • Dictionary of Islamic Artists, ed. Ernst Kuhnel, Gaston Wiet, and Mehmet Aga-Oglu.[5]
  • “Six Thousand Years of Persian Art”, The Art News, XXXVIII/30 (April 27, 1940), 7–19.
  • Aga-Oglu, M. (November 1931). "On a Manuscript by Al-Jazari". Parnassus. 3 (7): 27–28. doi:10.2307/770698. JSTOR 770698. S2CID 164805944. JSTOR

See also

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  • Weibel, Adèle Coulin (1951). "Mehmet Aga-Oglu (1896-1949)". Ars Islamica. 15/16. Department of the History of Art, University of Michigan: 267–271. JSTOR
  • Simavi, Zeynep. 2012. "Mehmet Aga-Oglu and the formation of the field of Islamic art in the United States." Journal of Art Historiography. 1–25. https://repository.si.edu/handle/10088/19552

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e f g Mehmet Aga-Oglu Papers. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives. (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.) Gift of Dr. Kamer Aga-Oglu, 1959.
  2. ^ Aga-oglu, M. (1929). "Four Egypto-Islamic Carved Panels". Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts of the City of Detroit. 11 (2): XXVIII–XXXI. doi:10.1086/BULLDETINST41501347. ISSN 0899-0271. JSTOR 41501347. S2CID 194935708.
  3. ^ Oleg Grabar, Islamic Visual Culture, 1100-1800, Vol. 2, (Ashgate Publishing, 2006), xxxiii.
  4. ^ "Ars Islamica on JSTOR". www.jstor.org. Retrieved 2020-04-11.
  5. ^ "Material for a Dictionary of Islamic Artists", Ars Islamica 3, no. 1 (1936): 123.