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Nasser Rabbat
B Arch (Damascus), M Arch (UCLA), Ph.D. (MIT)
Nasser Rabbat is the Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His scholarly interests include the history and historiography of Islamic art and architecture, urban history, and post-colonial criticism. His research focuses on the overlapping intercultural spaces where peoples have always met and exchanged ideas, views, beliefs, and practices, and, in the process, created art and architecture. His books include: The Citadel of Cairo: A New Interpretation of Royal Mamluk Architecture, (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), Thaqafat al Bina' wa Bina' al-Thaqafa (The Culture of Building and Building Culture) (Beirut: Riad Alrayyes Publisher, 2002), and L'art Islamique à la recherche d'une méthode historique (to be soon published by the Institut du monde arabe in Paris). He was a co-author of Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition , ed. D. Reynolds (University of California Press, 2001) and co-editor with Nezar AlSayyad and Irene Beirman of Making Cairo Medieval (Lexington Press, 2005).
He is currently completing a book on the historian al-Maqrizi, to be published by Brill in 2008 or 2009, and another on Mamluk history, Architecture As Social History: Building, Culture, and Politics in Mamluk Egypt and Syria (forthcoming, I.B. Tauris, 2008). He is also editing a book of essays on the courtyard house entitled, The Courtyard House: Between Cultural Expression and Universal Application, to be published by Ashgate in 2008, and the proceedings of an international conference, "Islamic Cities in the Classical Age," which he organized at MIT in May 2005.
Professor Rabbat worked as a designer in Los Angeles and Damascus. Among his honors are The American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) Fellowship (2007-08, 1999-00 and 1988-89), The Chaire de l'Institut du Monde Arabe (2003), and The J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship (1993-94). Beside publishing articles in specialized scholarly journals and edited collections, professor Rabbat regularly contributes to a number of Arabic newspapers and journals, such as al-Hayat, al-Adab, Wughat Nazar on art, architectural, and critical and cultural issues. He serves on the boards of various organizations concerned with Islamic cultures, lectures extensively in the US and abroad, and maintains several websites focused on Islamic Architecture.
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James L. Wescoat, Jr. earned his Bachelor of Landscape Architecture degree from Louisiana State University and practiced landscape architecture in the U.S. and Middle East before returning to graduate study in geography at the University of Chicago with an emphasis on water resources. He taught courses on landscape research, geographic theory, and water resources at the University of Chicago and University of Colorado at Boulder, where he was a memb
er of centers for South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Public Policy studies.
His research has concentrated on water systems in South Asia and the US from the site to river basin scales. For the greater part of his career, Professor Wescoat has focused on small-scale historical waterworks of Mughal gardens and cities in India and Pakistan. He led the Smithsonian Institution's project titled, "Garden, City, and Empire: The Historical Geography of Mughal Lahore," which resulted in a co-edited volume on Mughal Gardens: Sources, Places, Representations, Prospects , and The Mughal Garden: Interpretation, Conservation, and Implications with colleagues from the University of Engineering and Technology-Lahore. These and related books have won awards from the Government of Pakistan and Punjab Government. The overall Mughal Gardens Project won an American Society of Landscape Architects national research merit award, as did a project on The Moonlight Garden: New Discoveries at the Taj led by Elizabeth Moynihan. This work has been generously supported by fellowships from Dumbarton Oaks, the Freer and Sackler Galleries of Asian Art, and the American Academy in Rome
.
In 2002, Professor Wescoat became head of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois t Urbana-Champaign where he taught courses on "Landscape Experience, Inquiry and Design," the "Theory and Practice of Landscape Architecture," and design studios on urban ecological design in Chicago. Together with colleagues and students at the University of Illinois he contributed to a cultural landscape heritage conservation project at the Champaner-Pavagadh World Heritage Site in Gujarat, India, for the Baroda Heritage Trust. More recently, he has organized a garden and waterworks conservation workshop at the Nagaur palace-garden complex in Rajasthan for the Mehrangarh Museum Trust; and a workshop on the "Three Shalamar Baghs of Delhi, Lahore, and Srinagar" with colleagues from those cities.
At the larger scale, Professor Wescoat has conducted water policy research in the Colorado, Indus, Ganges, and Great Lakes basins, including the history of multilateral water agreements. He led a USEPA-funded study of potential climate impacts in the Indus River Basin in Pakistan with the Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA). More recently, he led an NSF-funded project on "Water and Poverty in Colorado." He is currently conducting comparative research on international water problems. In 2003, he published Water for Life: Water Management and Environmental Policy with geographer Gilbert F. White (Cambridge University Press); and in 2007 he co-edited Political Economies of Landscape Change: Places of Integrative Power (Springer Publishing) for LAF Landscape Futures Initiative.
Wescoat Curriculum Vitae
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