Petya Andreeva

Petya Andreeva teaches and writes on premodern East and Central Asian art with a special focus on cross-cultural exchange. She received her BA in East Asian Studies from Colby College and her PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from UPenn. Her work is interdisciplinary and draws from methods and frameworks in art history, cultural history, social anthropology, Sinology, and the environmental humanities. Andreeva’s broad interests span several periods and cultural spheres: ancient and medieval Chinese funerary art, Central Asian archaeology, nomadic metalwork, fantastic beasts in ancient Eurasia, art and patronage in the Mongol empire, to name a few. She is especially interested in the movements of objects and ideas across borders and along trade routes such as the Eurasian Steppe and Silk Road networks. Dr. Andreeva studies how migration created shared visual languages in Asia; she is equally fascinated by how frontier regions have historically generated unique artistic movements and aesthetic systems. Her first book “Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies”  (Edinburgh, 2024) traces the dissemination of animal-inspired images from the nomadic world to China and beyond, and demonstrates that ancient pastoralists played a pivotal role in the shaping of a global Eurasia. She has also published an edited volume entitled The Zoomorphic Arts of Ancient Central Eurasia (MDPI, 2023) as well as scholarly articles in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Early China, Archaeological Research in Asia, Fashion Theory, etc. Her most recent book chapter has appeared in the UNESCO Silk Road Papers. Petya Andreeva has received several international awards and fellowships including the UNESCO Silk Road Research Grant, Getty-ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the ICAS Dissertation Accolade. Andreeva has given invited lectures worldwide, including at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, University of Cambridge, Tulane, Yale, Connecticut College, Indiana University, Heidelberg, Kingston University, the American Center for Mongolian Studies in Ulaanbaatar, the China Institute in America, to name a few. Originally from Bulgaria, she works with sources in Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Bulgarian, and Mongolian.