Sheila Blair shares the Norma Jean Calderwood University Professorship of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College and the Hamad bin Khalifa Endowed Chair in Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University with her husband and colleague Jonathan Bloom. Author, co-author and editor of dozens of books and hundreds of articles on all aspects of Islamic art, she is particularly interested in the arts of the Mongol period and the uses of writing.

'...collects together secondary material which is scattered and difficult to locate.'J.M. Rogers, BSOAS, 1992.'...cette somme de travail patient et érudit qui apporte une contribution notable à l'épigraphie arabe.'Solange Ory, Bulletin Critique des Annales Islamologiques, 1993.'...this is a very important work of scholarship which will be of great benefit to a wide range of scholars in different fields of Islamic studies.'Carole Hillenbrand, Journal of Semitic Studies, 1996.