Matthew P. Canepa (PhD, University of Chicago) is Professor of Art History and Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Presidential Chair in Art History and Archaeology of Ancient Iran at University of California, Irvine. He is the founder and Director of UCI’s interdisciplinary Graduate Specialization in Ancient Iran and the Premodern Persianate World. An award-winning historian of art, archaeology and religions, his research focuses on the intersection of art, ritual and power in the eastern Mediterranean, Persia and the wider Iranian world. He is a faculty member in University of California, Irvine’s Department of Art History and Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies and affiliated faculty member of the Department of History,  Department of Classics, and Program in Critical Theory.  Professor Canepa is a core faculty member in UC Irvine’s Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture, which is University of California’s oldest center for Iranian Studies and one of the leading research institutes of its kind in the world.

Professor Canepa’s recent edited volume entitled Persian Cultures of Power and the Entanglement of the Afro-Eurasian World was published with Getty Research Institute Publications in 2024. It brings together scholars working from a variety of disciplinary standpoints and period, from antiquity to the twentieth century, to understand the roles that Persian visual, material, and expressive cultures played at various points in knitting together the Afro-Eurasian world. It is the first study of its type to explore this problem from a multi-disciplinary approach from antiquity, to the coming of Islam through the so-called Persianate Millennium. His most recent monograph is entitled The Iranian Expanse: Transforming Royal Identity through Landscape, Architecture, and the Built Environment (550 BCE – 642 CE) (University of California Press, 2018/Paperback edition 2020). Winner of the Archaeological Institute of America’s 2020 James R. Wiseman Book Award for best academic work on an archaeological topic, it is a large-scale study of the transformation of Iranian cosmologies, landscapes and architecture from the height of the Achaemenids to the coming of Islam. His publications include The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual of Kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran (University of California Press, 2009; paperback ed. 2017), the first book to analyze the artistic, ritual and ideological interactions between the late Roman and Sasanian empires in a comprehensive and theoretically rigorous manner. It was awarded the 2010 James Henry Breasted Prize from the American Historical Association for the best book in English on any field of history prior to the year 1000 CE. Theorizing Cross-Cultural Interaction (Smithsonian, 2010) studies the phenomena of cross-cultural interaction between the ancient to early Medieval Mediterranean, Western Asia and China. He served as area advisor and editor for Persia, Central Asia and Art and Archaeology for the The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity (2018), the first comprehensive reference covering every aspect of history, culture, religion, and life in Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East (including the Persian Empire and Central Asia).

Professor Canepa is an elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and has been the recipient of numerous research fellowships including from The Council of American Overseas Research Centers (2024-2025 and 2002-2003), The Getty Research Institute (2019 and 2013), The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2015-2016),  The American Council of Learned Societies (2009-2010), and the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (2007). In fall 2009 he was invited to be the Michaelmas Term visiting Senior Research Fellow at Merton College, University of Oxford. In 2016 he lectured as Directeur d’études invité at L’École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris.