MARGARET SQUIRES

May Beattie Visiting Fellow in Carpet Studies

Margaret Squires Ashmolean staff member portrait

Contact
Email: margaret.squires@ashmus.ox.ac.uk
ORCID: 0009-0008-2437-5452

Biography

Margaret Squires is an art historian specialising in the early modern Persianate world. She has particular expertise in the material and socio-cultural aspects of carpets and textiles woven in Iran, bridging specialist technical knowledge with historical research. Her current research as May Beattie Visiting Fellow traces the circulation of woven media, technologies, and craftspeople across early modern Iran and India. She is also preparing a monograph based on her PhD dissertation, entitled The Safavid Carpet in Architectural Context, to be published with Edinburgh University Press in 2027.

Beyond her specialist knowledge of carpets and textiles, Margaret has a wide range of experience teaching and curating the arts of the Iranian and Islamic worlds. Prior to her doctoral work, she worked as a curatorial assistant for Art of the Islamic worlds, where she contributed to catalogues of ceramics, metalwork, and manuscripts as an author and translator. Her background in museums informs her teaching and research, grounding her approaches in the histories of objects, collections, and institutions. 

Margaret is also committed to public scholarship and outreach, sharing her academic work through social media and as a contributor to publications including The Art Newspaper, BBC Mundo, HALI, and Selvedge Magazine. She regularly lectures for museums and special-interest groups, most recently the Cincinnati Art Museum, the George Washington University Museum and the Textile Museum, the Hajji Baba Club, and the Oriental Rug and Textile Society. 

She received her PhD from The Courtauld Institute of Art in 2025, her MA in Art history from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2018, and her BA in Middle Eastern languages and literatures from the University of Virginia in 2016. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Historians of Islamic Art Association, the British Institute of Persian Studies, and the Hajji Baba Club.

Expand All

Art and architecture of early modern Iran, technical study of carpets and textiles, circulation of objects, people, and ideas across the Indo-Persianate world, history of collecting and museum studies

Margaret has taught undergraduate modules on the collection and display of Persian art and on approaches to Islamic ornament at The Courtauld Institute of Art.

She has also delivered lectures on Safavid carpets and textiles for the Postgraduate diploma in Asian art at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and the Victoria and Albert Museum's continuing education programme. 

Architectural history, theory and criticism; Art History

Featured publications