Marianna Shreve Simpson has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, and has published, taught, and lectured widely on medieval and early modern Islamic art in general and the arts of the book (especially Persian illustrated manuscripts) in particular. From 1980 to 1992, she helped direct the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, and from 1992 to 1995, served as Curator of Islamic Near Eastern Art at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (Smithsonian Institution). From 1995 to 2000, she was Director of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Islamic Art at the Walters Art Gallery (now Walters Art Museum) in Baltimore, and continued her affiliation with the museum as Visiting Curator of Islamic Art (through October 2001) and Senior Consultant for the Islamic Manuscript Digitization Project (2009–10). In recent years, she also has served as a consultant for the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, and the Manuscripts of the Muslim World digitization project; as President of the Historians of Islamic Art Association (2011–13); and as Guest Curator at the Princeton University Art Museum. Her books include Princeton’s Great Book of Kings: The Peck Shahnama (Princeton University Art Museum, 2015); Persian Poetry, Painting, and Patronage: Illustrations in a Sixteenth-Century Masterpiece (Yale University Press and Freer Gallery of Art, 1998); and Sultan Ibrahim Mirza’s “Haft Awrang”: A Princely Manuscript from Sixteenth-Century Iran (Yale University Press and Freer Gallery of Art, 1997).

Kelly Tuttle started working with Islamicate manuscripts while completing a doctoral degree at the University of Pennsylvania. Within the field of Islamicate manuscript culture, she is particularly intrigued by information transmission in the premodern world as it appears in commentary and abridgment, and also as it appears in provenance records and notes. She served as the Cataloging Librarian for the Manuscripts of the Muslim World Project, which was a cooperative project funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources to catalog and digitize Islamicate manuscripts from Columbia University, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania, and other Philadelphia-area repositories. Islamic Manuscript Basics is a course and website for beginners that she put together based on the MMW project. Currently, she serves on the editorial board for Manuscript Studies and in her free time, helps librarians and other interested parties figure out which Islamicate manuscripts they have sitting in their uncataloged collections.