Kadoi's edited volume, which gauges the impact of American Orientalist Arthur Upham Pope (1881–1969) on the fields of Iranian art, architecture and archaeology, joins an ever-expanding literature on the historiography of Islamic art and architecture. Previous studies of Pope's wide-ranging projects, inside and outside Iran, have similarly measured their effects on the emergence, formation and development of the interlinked fields of art, architecture and archaeology through their different contexts – in the field, the academy, the museum – and means of dissemination – various forms of publication and exhibition – as well as their modes and points of intersection with the realms of commerce and politics (see the essays by Barry D. Wood, Kishwar Rizvi, and Talinn Grigor in Kadoi's introductory bibliography, pp. 10–12). Such studies added necessary critical perspectives to earlier publications that gathered materials on Pope's biography, as well as that of Phyllis Ackerman, Pope's crucial partner in professional and personal life (Jay Gluck and Noël Siver (eds), Surveyors of Persian Art: A Documentary Biography of Arthur Upham Pope & Phyllis Ackerman (Ashiya, Japan, and Costa Mesa, CA: SoPA and Mazda Publishers, 1996). Pope was hailed the “P.T. Barnum of Islamic art” by Stuart Cary Welch († 2008) and styled a “fancy operator at some complicated edge between scholarship, dealing and collecting” by Oleg Grabar († 2011) (p. 4). Whatever one thinks about Pope's intellectual abilities, character, and ethical conduct – most authors in Kadoi's volume sidestep these matters – nobody can deny that he promoted the art and architecture of Iran, spanning 5,000 years, and enhanced its visibility through study, collection, publication, and exhibition.

Pope's first interests in the region are discernible in an exhibition of carpets he curated at the Rhode Island School of Design where he taught Philosophy (until 1911). After teaching at University of California, Berkeley (until 1917), and Amherst College (in 1918), his role as a professor ended. From 1920 onward, he performed roles in art consultancy, working independently for clients and advising institutions (e.g. Art Institute of Chicago, the Pennsylvania Museum of Art, Philadelphia). The true watershed occurred in April 1925 when Pope made his first visit to Iran and benefited from the serendipitous opportunity of lecturing on Persian art before Reza Khan (1878–1944), Prime Minister and future Shah. Pope's concepts resonated with the Iranian elite and later with an evolving Pahlavi-era nationalist ideology, especially in its instrumentalization of cultural patrimony. The 1925 encounter precipitated a series of commissions and secured privileged access to historical sites and resources. (Pope's biography is addressed throughout Kadoi's volume. For the distilled vita, see Encyclopaedia Iranica, s.v. “Pope, Arthur Upham” (Noël Siver)). A flurry of projects led and initiated by Pope stemmed from that time, coinciding with those of other Americans and Europeans who jockeyed for access to sites and collections throughout Iran. Pope's largest achievement in publishing, co-edited with Ackerman, was the multi-authored, nine-volume A Survey of Persian Art from Prehistoric Times to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938–39), whose chief value then as now lay in its photography. (The subject of photography forms an illuminating essay by Keelan Overton.) Despite these efforts, the “first start” in the study of Persian art and architecture – spearheaded by Pope and others – had all but fizzled out by the 1950s. Interest peaked again in the 1960s and 1970s.

Following Kadoi's introduction, where she articulates emphases of theme and approach in the volume, the fourteen essays making up A New Survey of Persian Art are arranged under five headings: “Pope, Ackerman, and their peers”; “Arthur Upham Pope: life and achievements”, “Curators, collectors, and art dealers: Pope and Pre-Islamic Persian art”; “Curators, collectors, and art dealers: Pope and Islamic Persian art”; and “Arthur Upham Pope: his legacy”. Resulting from a conference convened at the University of Chicago in 2010, the papers introduce a variety of valuable perspectives and much that is new. We form a good understanding of the characters populating – and the life of – an unfolding field; the nature of its manifold challenges, e.g. technological, logistical, financial; asymmetries between the separate subfields of art history; and the early emergence of fault lines in the discipline whether because of varying ideologies or personal relationships and rivalries. Though we learn something of Pope's mental landscape and idées fixes, certain themes could easily have been expanded, particularly his understanding of architecture and its history: which authors had he read, how he viewed monuments and urban space, how his approach differed from that of his peers?

Kadoi clearly understands that while such exercises in historiography might be interesting in and of themselves, they have much greater purpose if they can help us identify persistent legacies in the formation and construction of a field, its canon of objects, and recurring questions with an eye to recasting them. Through archival work, several essays in the volume lay the groundwork to achieve this goal, especially the two parts on curators, collectors, and art dealers in pre-Islamic and Islamic Persian art. These case studies (especially essays by Lindsay Allen, Judith Lerner, Yuka Kadoi, Kimberley Masteller, and Laura Weinstein), add significant detail and texture to institutional histories, the growth of collections, arrangements with the market, and interpersonal relationships. These authors’ deep dives fulfil the editor's mandate “to reassess the life and achievements of Pope's career in a holistic way” (p. 6). The only essay to confront directly the question of Pope's scholarly legacy is offered by Sheila Blair who focuses on the interrelation between the Survey of Persian Art (1938–39) and its age, and subsequent revisions to it over three editions.

The larger promise of such inquiries, gestured to in the somewhat ambiguous second half of the title Arthur Upham Pope and A New Survey of Persian Art, lies ahead. Further studies should hone in on Pope's various legacies to consider the reformation of the art historical notion of “Persian” art other than as a geographic descriptor. It is also crucial to conduct future work by examining and assessing the impact of Pope, among other Western scholars, on Iranian intellectuals whose work and voices deserve greater attention.