The journal circulates interdisciplinary scholarship on Middle Eastern and Asian art, using one central theme per volume. Ars Orientalis 51 focuses on the graphic arts, and the ways in which the graphic arts disseminated and transfigured forms and materials across Asia and between territories in Asia and Europe. Devin Fitzgerald (PhD, Harvard University), for example, discusses the global reach of premodern Chinese papers. Anna Arabindan-Kesson, who gives a talk for the Department on March 16, 2022, as part of the On Speculation lecture series, investigates depictions of the infectious disease, parangi, in colonial Sri Lanka.

Not only has Shaffer edited this volume; the journal also features two pieces of her writing, one of which is the introduction to the issue, entitled, “The Graphic Arts: Replication and the Force of Forms.” In the essay, “Portraits and Types: Reinscribing Forms in Nineteenth-Century India and Europe,” she uses the French publishing house Firmin Didot and its publication Le Costume historique (1888) as a case study to analyze the intersection of Indian and European typologies among Indian drawings and paintings, French chromolithographic books, and British miniatures and colonial photographs.