Richard Ellis
Position title: Ph.D. Student
Pronouns: he/him/his
Email: rwellis@wisc.edu
Website: Richard Ellis's website
Education
B.A. University of South Florida, 2017
M.A. University of South Florida, 2019
Biography
Richard W. Ellis joined the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison as a doctoral student in the fall of 2024. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art history from the University of South Florida (USF), where he focused on Islamic art and architecture. Prior to beginning his doctoral studies, Richard instructed a variety of courses in art history at the University of South Florida and the University of Tampa. Richard’s research is centered around Islamic calligraphy, painted manuscripts, and ceramic ornament from Persia. He primarily focuses on the ways in which literature and poetry are manifested in the visual arts and unify diverse media throughout broad spans of time. Other research areas include Orientalism and the history of collecting Islamic art, as well as modern and contemporary art of the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia.
Research Interests
Richard’s MA Thesis, submitted to the University of South Florida in 2019, is titled Seeing King Solomon through the Verses of Hafez: A Critical Study of Two Safavid Manuscript Fragments. In this paper, he argues for the attribution of two dispersed and collaged folios to the city of Shiraz and offers an interpretation of their unique text-image relationship.
In 2020, Richard collaborated with the Tampa Museum of Art by participating in a panel discussion for the traveling exhibition Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s—1980s. He also published an exhibition review for Bay Art Files on the traveling exhibition Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love, while it was on view at the Tampa Museum of Art in 2023.
In 2023, Richard delivered a public lecture titled “In the Shadow of the Crescent: The Tampa Bay Hotel and Islamic Architecture,” explaining how the architect of the nineteenth-century building drew inspiration from a variety of monuments across the Islamic world to create a fantastical destination for Victorian tourists.
His entry on Islamic calligraphy for Oxford Bibliographies Online, co-authored with Dr. Esra Akın-Kıvanç at the University of South Florida, is currently under review.
Primary Advisor(s):
Jennifer Pruitt