Mira Xenia Schwerda

Education & Professional History

Princeton University, MA; Harvard University, PhD

Mira Xenia Schwerda (PhD, 2020, Harvard University) is a historian of photography and print culture and of modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art. Her book manuscript-in-progress, tentatively titled Between Art and Propaganda: Photographing Revolution in Modern Iran (1905–1911), focuses on the art and visual culture of Iran’s Constitutional Revolution. She has been awarded several competitive grants and fellowships for her research, including the Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellowship, and has published her research in traditional academic outlets such as peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes, exhibition catalogues, as well as in public-facing form, e.g. video essays. Translation and cross-cultural contact play a key role in her work. She is the co-editor of the journal Art in Translation and has published her academic work in both English and Persian. Previously, Dr. Schwerda has worked at the Harvard Art Museums, where she curated the photography section of the exhibition Technologies of the Image: Art in 19th-Century Iran. Furthermore, she is the managing director and co-founder of the digital humanities initiative Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online as well as the co-founder of the Virtual Islamic Art History Seminar Series.

Dr. Schwerda has taught courses in the history of photography, global modern art history, Islamic art history, and South Asian art history. At Carleton College, she will be teaching a new course on AI and art history as well as courses on modern Middle Eastern art and revolutionary image regimes at the turn of the twentieth century.