Wednesday October 21st 2026 Dr Margaret Squires: 'Holes in the Carpet: The Problem of Survival Bias'Caledonian Club, London. 18.00 for 18.30.

‘Holes in the Carpet: The Problem of Survival Bias’

Some of the fundamental questions facing any carpet scholar are: What survives, and why? How do we grapple with the enormous gaps in the material record? This lecture, a reflection on these core problems in carpet studies, will draw on the epilogue to Margaret’s forthcoming monograph, The Safavid Carpet in Architectural Context (forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press, 2027).

Focusing on Safavid carpets, she will discuss the forces that have shaped the material available for study. Given the inherent fragility of any textile medium, degradation over time has been an enormously important factor. On the other hand, more subjective forces played a role, like which carpets were selected to gift, export, and sell, which were walked on daily and which were stored away, and which carpets interested foreign buyers, first in the early modern period then during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century rug collecting boom. Could there be entire categories of Safavid carpets that do not survive? Is our understanding of Safavid carpet production as a whole overly weighted by the carpets which, by choice or by chance, ended up in Western collections?

In the end, many of these questions will remain unanswered. The idea, in acknowledging the incompleteness of the material record, is to open up the myriad possibilities of what might have been and what may still emerge.

Margaret Squires, PhD, is the May Beattie Visiting Fellow in Carpet Studies at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. She completed her PhD in History of Art at The Courtauld Institute of Art in 2025 and is currently preparing a monograph based on that research entitled The Safavid Carpet in Architectural Context, forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press in 2027. At the same time, she is also pursuing new research about the circulation of carpets, weavers, and technologies across the early modern Indo-Persianate World. Margaret has taught undergraduate and postgraduate students about Persian and Islamic art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, The Courtauld Institute of Art, SOAS, the V&A Academy, and Oxford University, worked as a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and regularly lends her expertise on carpets to museums, collectors, and auction houses around the world.