Cheryl Porter
Cheryl Porter is the Deputy Director of the Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation & Dar al-Kutub Manuscript Project in Cairo, Egypt. She is responsible for the drafting and implementation of preservation and conservation strategies, designing an ongoing program of visiting specialists and devising and developing research programs, especially concerned with Islamic material culture. She was elected secretary of The Islamic Manuscript Association Conservation Sub-committee in 2007. Since 1988 she has been the Director of the Montefiascone Project at the Seminario Barbarigo in Montefiascone, Italy, where she co-ordinates an extensive international conservation program for scholars and students of the book. She has lectured worldwide and is frequently consulted on her particular area of expertise, which is the analysis and conservation of inks and color in manuscripts. Her essays include “The Use of Alum in the Preparation of Tawed Skin for Book Covers in the 11th -15th Centuries: Advantages and Disadvantages for the Book Structure,” in L’Alun de Mediterranee (2005), “Pigments on Parchment - Flaking and Consolidation,” in Conservazione Dei Materiali Librari Archivistici e Grafici (1999), “You Can’t Tell a Pigment by its Colour,” in Making the Medieval Book: Techniques of Production (1995), and “Laser Raman Spectroscopy – a Tool for Non-destructive Pigment Analysis for Manuscripts,” in The Paper Conservator (1992).
