Walter Denny

Walter B. Denny is Distinguished Professor of Art History at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, specializing in the art of the Islamic world.  From 2007 to 2013 he has served as Senior Consultant in the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  After undergraduate education at Robert College (Istanbul), Grinnell College and Oberlin College, and graduate studies at Harvard and at Istanbul Technical University, he completed his Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard in 1970. His research interests in Islamic art concentrate in the Ottoman Turkish sphere, including architecture, design and painting, carpets, silk textiles, and ceramics. For over forty years he has also taught, pursued research, and published on the thousand-year history of east-west interchange in European artistic culture. He has served as a consultant for dozens of museums around the world, and his seminar in Museum Studies has prepared many University of Massachusetts graduate students for art museum careers.  He frequently gives lectures on a variety of topics in the U.S. and abroad.