Navinda Hajat Haidar is the curator and the guiding force behind New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s, better known as the Met, newly renovated Islamic art wing. Previously known as the Islamic Art galleries, the new galleries opened to the public 10 years after the 9/11 attacks to wide public approval. An Oxford-educated art historian, 48-year-old Haidar was in Delhi, taking part in a symposium on the arts of the Deccan, organised by the Aesthetics Project, that dovetailed into an exhibition currently being held at the National Museum.

Read More: Deccan Art’s Syncretic Touch

With the death of Professor George Scanlon on Sunday 13 July, during a short visit to New York, the field of Islamic art and architecture has lost a remarkable scholar and perhaps the last of the great amateur archaeologists: amateur in the best eighteenth-century sense of the word. His loss will resonate throughout Cairo, where he made his life’s home, in so far as anyone with such wide tastes and universal interests can be said to have had a temporal home, but, as his muse was Egypt, he wore the city like a comfortable old pair of shoes. His students will remember him as an inspired and incomparable cicerone of the Islamic architecture of Cairo, pointing out the discreet beauty of some stonework or the historical significance of some monument, but always insisting on the exactitude of dates and facts.

Read More: A Scholarly Life: Professor George Scanlon

Julian Raby, the Dame Jillian Sackler Director of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian’s museums of Asian art, has been awarded the Presidential Order of Merit, conferred by the president of the Republic of Turkey for contributions to Turkish art and culture. The award is one of Turkey’s highest honors. On behalf of President Abdullah Gül, Turkish Ambassador to the U.S. Serdar Kılıç presented the medal to Raby at an August 13 awards ceremony held at The Turkish Embassy Residence in Washington, D.C. “I’m deeply honored to receive this medal,” said Raby. “I first visited Turkey in 1967 and fell in love with its people, its places and its histories. My friendships from those early years evolved into collaborative projects, and I owe a remarkable debt to my Turkish friends and colleagues for their support and scholarship.”

Read More: President of Turkey Awards Freer and Sackler Galleries Director Julian Raby the Order of Merit

David Whitehouse, former executive director of The Corning Museum of Glass, died February 17th, 2013, following a brief battle with cancer. He was 71. Whitehouse joined The Corning Museum of Glass in 1984 as chief curator. He became director in 1992, then executive director and curator of ancient and Islamic glass in 1999. He remained in that role until 2011. Whitehouse had a profound impact on the Museum and on the advancement of the scholarship and understanding of glass.

Read More: David Whitehouse

The Washington University community is saddened to learn of the sudden and accidental death of Melanie Michailidis, PhD, who was in the second year of a three-year post-doctoral fellowship with the university’s Department of Art History and Archaeology, in Arts & Sciences, and who had a joint appointment with the St. Louis Art Museum. She was killed in an automobile accident Friday night [February 1st 2013], along with two other individuals. Our thoughts and prayers go out to her family, friends and colleagues during this difficult time.

Read More: Melanie Michailidis