Finbarr Barry Flood is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the Humanities at the Institute of Fine Arts and Department of Art History, New York University. A historian of material culture, between 2017 and 2024 he was the founder-director of NYU’s Silsila: Center for Material Histories. 

His books include The Great Mosque of Damascus: Studies on the Makings of an Umayyad Visual Culture (2000), Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter, (2009), and the two-volume Blackwell Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture (2017), co-edited with Gülru Necipoğlu. In spring 2019 he was the Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, delivering a series of eight public lectures entitled Islam and Image: Beyond Aniconism and Iconoclasm. In autumn 2019 he delivered the Chaire du Louvre lectures at the Musée du Louvre on the theme Technologies de dévotion dans les arts de l’islam: pèlerins, reliques, et copies, accompanied by a book of the same title. In 2024 Tales Things Tell – Material Histories of Early Globalisms, co-written with Beate Fricke, University of Bern, was published by Princeton University Press, winning the 2024 book prize of the International Center of Medieval Art.  

He is currently completing a long-term book project, provisionally entitled Islam and Image: Contested Histories, which formed the basis of the Slade Lectures. He will be working on this project while Resident at the Academy.