Biography

Lamia Balafrej is Associate Professor of Art History at UCLA, specializing in the arts of the Islamic world. Her current book project, Instrumental Figures, historicizes slavery, race, technology, and wonder in early Islam. The project has been supported by a 2023 Rome Prize and a 2023 Getty Scholar Grant. Her interest in instrumentality grew out of her first book, The Making of the Artist in Late Timurid Painting, which examined Persian painting's labor-intensive intricacy. Hailing from Morocco, she is an alumna of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and received her PhD from the Université Aix-Marseille.

Project Summary

This project examines the transhistorical motif of the feminized robot from the vantage point of the early modern Mediterranean. The feminized robot—automated devices that replicate female stereotypes like caregiving or secretarial activities—extends back to ancient literature and continues to inform the latest technologies, including algorithmic assistants like Apple’s Siri. This research will focus on automated serving-women in early modern Italy and their relation to mechanical female slaves in premodern Arabic treatises. The goal is to develop a framework for understanding the Mediterranean circulation of the feminized robot, not simply as the repetition of the same trope, but as an ongoing, figuring palimpsest, made of multiple, heterogeneous layers.