CURRENT FACULTY
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Nasser Rabbat (on leave Fall 07-Spring 08)
Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Architecture, MIT
AKPIA@MIT Director
Professor Rabbat earned his BArch from the University of Damascus, MArch II from UCLA, and PhD from MIT. His dissertation "The Citadel of Cairo, 1176-1341: Reconstructing Architecture from Texts" won the 1991 Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award from the Middle East Study Association. A book based on the dissertation, The Citadel of Cairo: A New Interpretation of Royal Mamluk Architecture , was published in 1995. Professor Rabbat has a book of essays on architecture in Arabic titled Thaqafat al Bina' wa Bina' al-Thaqafa (The Culture of Building and Building Culture) (Beirut: Riad Alrayyes Publisher, 2002). He is 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 putting the finishing touches on a study on the fifteenth-century Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi , which will be published by Brill, and a collection of essays, Architecture As Social History: Building, Culture, and Politics in Mamluk Egypt and Syria, currently under consideration by I.B. Tauris. He is also working on two other books: L'art Islamique à la recherche d'une méthode historique, a collection of essays which he originally delivered as lectures at the Institut du monde arabe (IMA) in Paris, and the proceedings of an international conference, "Islamic Cities in the Classical Age," which he organized at MIT in May 2005.
Before joining the faculty in 1991, Rabbat worked as a designer in Los Angeles and in Damascus. Among his honors are The Chaire de l'Institut du Monde Arabe (2003), The American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) Fellowship (1999-00 and 1988-89); The J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship (1993-94) in the History of Art and Humanities; and a visitorship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton (1996-97). Beside publishing articles in specialized scholarly journals and edited collections in English, French, and Arabic, professor Rabbat regularly contributes to a number of Arabic newspapers and journals, such as Wughat Nazar, Akhbar al-Adab, Jaridat al-Funun, al-Hayat and al-Adaab, 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.
Aga Khan Professor, MIT
Joins AKPIA@MIT in the Fall 2008
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 member 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.
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Nada Shabout
Sping 2008 AKPIA@MIT Lecturer
Nada Shabout was trained in architecture at the New York Institute of Technology, the University of Texas at Arlington and the Architectural Association School of Architecture , London, England. She has also earned BFA fine arts, MA and PhD in the Humanities with a concentration in art history and criticism from the University of Texas at Arlington, 1999. She wrote her dissertation on "Modern Arab Art and the Metamorphosis of the Arabic Letter." A book based on her dissertation "Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics," was published by the University of Florida Press, 2007. She has been an Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of North Texas since 2002, teaching Arab visual culture and Islamic art. She has been working on the documentation of modern Iraqi heritage, particularly the collection previously held at the Iraqi Museum of Modern Art since her visit to Baghdad in June 2003. She has been organizing panels and presenting around the world on the state of Iraq's modern heritage following 2003, the relationship of identity and visual representations in modern and contemporary Iraqi art, and exhibitions of Middle Eastern arts in the West since 911.
Among her honors is The American Academic Research Institute in Iraq ( TAARII) fellowship 2006, 2007; and Fulbright Senior Scholar Program, 2007 Lecture/Research fellowship to Jordan Project, " Arab Art Now: A Study of the Contemporary Art Vision in Jordan." She is a founding member and first president (2007-2009) of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab world, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA).
She is the curator of the traveling exhibition "Dafatir: Contemporary Iraqi Book Art," 2005-07; and "Moments from 20th Century Iraqi Art," at t he Montalvo Art Center , California, 2007- 2008 . She has edited the exhibition catalogue "Dafatir: Contemporary Iraqi Book Art (UNT Art Gallery, 2007).
She is the author several articles that examine legal and ethical responsibilities of the US in Iraq after 2003, including, "The Iraqi Museum of Modern Art: Ethical Implications," Collections ( Vol. 2, no. 4, May, AltaMira Press , 2006 ); "Historiographic Invisibilities: The Case of Contemporary Iraqi Art," the International Journal of the Humanities (volume 3, Number 9, 2006); "The "Free" Art of Occupation: Images for a "New" Iraq," Arab Studies Quarterly (Volume 28, Number 3 and 4 Summer and Fall 2006); and "Preservation of Iraqi Modern Heritage in the Aftermath of the US Invasion of 2003," in Gail Levin and Elaine A. King, eds, An anthology on Ethics in the Art World (Allworth Press, 2006).
