Bilha Moor

Bilha Moor is Assistant Professor of Islamic art history. Her PhD was awarded at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies. Her research concentrates on Islamic figurative painting, mainly illustrated manuscripts, ca. 1280–1700, and on early Islamic Arabic inscriptions in architectural, historical, and religious contexts, ca. 690–780. Her book, Illustrated Ottoman Cosmographies, c. 1550–1700: The World through Muslim Eyes (Edinburgh University Press, 2025) is the first monograph on illustrated Ottoman cosmographies produced in the capital Istanbul and the Ottoman provinces of Egypt, Syria and Baghdad. Other recent publications include “Early Qur’ānic Epigraphy in Public Shrines” (Encyclopaedia of the Qur’ān Online, 2024); and “Shah ‘Abbās I, the Safavid Concourse of the Birds, and the Reception of Ming One Hundred Birds Compositions in Persian Painting” (Artibus Asiae, 2022), which offers a new reading for a well-known royal Persian painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

At the University of Denver, Bilha teaches classes on a thousand years of art, architecture, and material culture in the Islamic lands, from Spain in the west to India in the east. Formerly, she was the Mellon postdoctoral fellow of Islamic art and architecture at Northwestern University, a Rothschild postdoctoral fellow at SOAS (University of London), and a research associate with the Shahnama Project at the University of Cambridge. She taught classes in Islamic art history and Arabic literature at Northwestern University, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the University of Haifa.

Select Publications:
Moor, Bilha. Illustrated Ottoman Cosmographies, c. 1550–1700: The World through Muslim Eyes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025.
Moor, Bilha. “Early Qur’anic Epigraphy in Public Shrines.” In Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an Online. Edited by Johanna Pink, Anne-Sylvie Boisliveau, Suleyman Dost, Saqib Hussain and Nimet Şeker. Leiden: Brill, 2024.
Moor, Bilha. “Shah ‘Abbas I, the Safavid Concourse of the Birds, and the Reception of Ming One Hundred Birds Compositions in Persian Painting.” Artibus Asiae 82, no. 1 (2022): 51–99.
Moor, Bilha. “The Jew, the Orthodox Christian, and the European in Ottoman Eyes, ca. 1550–1700.” In Disliking Others: Loathing, Hostility and Distrust in Pre-Modern Ottoman Lands. Edited by Hakan T. Karateke, H. Erdem Çıpa and Helga Anetshofer, 75–106. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2018.
Moor, Bilha. “Mosque and Church: Arabic Inscriptions at Shivta in the Early Islamic Period.” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam (JSAI) 40 (2013): 73–141.
Moor, Bilha. “Shahnama Kings and Heroes in ‘Aja’ib al-Makhlūqat Illustrated Manuscripts.” In Shahnama Studies II: The Reception of Firdausi’s Shahnama. Edited by Charles Melville and Gabrielle van den Berg, 267–80, pls. 23–26. Leiden: Brill, 2012.
Milstein, Rachel, and Bilha Moor, “Wonders of a Changing World: Late Illustrated ‘Aja’ib Manuscripts.” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam (JSAI) 32 (2006): 1–48.
Moor Bilha, and Efim A. Rezvan. “Al-Qazwini’s ‘Aja’ib al-Makhluqat wa Ghara’ib al-Mawjudat: Manuscript D370.” Manuscripta Orientalia 8, no. 4 (December 2002): 38–68.
Moor, Bilha. “Popular Medicine, Divination, and Holy Geography: Sixteenth-Century Illustrations to Tusi’s ‘Aja’ib al-Makhluqat,” PhD dissertation, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2010.