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Category Archives: Scholars – United States

Deccan Art’s Syncretic Touch

15 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by StudiesIslamica in Scholars - United States

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Navinda Haidar

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.

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Thomas Lentz to Leave Harvard Art Museums

30 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by StudiesIslamica in Museums - North America, Scholars - United States

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Thomas Lentz

Thomas W. Lentz, Cabot director of the Harvard Art Museums, today announced that he would step down at the end of the academic year — a surprising and apparently unexpected development that comes less than three months after the November 16 gala reopening of the wholly renovated, reconfigured museums complex. The more than decade-long reconstruction and consolidation of the collections in a new space built in, around, and above the original Fogg structure, with extensive teaching and conservation facilities included, was the focus of Lentz’s work since his arrival in late 2003. An expert on Islamic art (specifically, Persian painting), he earned his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1985, and immediately before returning to Cambridge to assume the museums’ directorship had served as director of the Smithsonian Institution’s international art museums, including the Freer and Sackler galleries and the National Museum of African Art.

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A Scholarly Life: Professor George Scanlon

03 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by StudiesIslamica in Scholars - United States

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George Scanlon

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.

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

25 Monday Aug 2014

Posted by StudiesIslamica in Scholars - United States

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Julian Raby

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

Oleg Grabar: The Scholarly Legacy

05 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by StudiesIslamica in Islamic Art - Essays, Scholars - United States

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It is safe to say that the flood of reminiscences, obituaries, and various kinds of public necrologies that have marked the death of Oleg Grabar are quite without parallel in the history of Islamic art history. They complement the numerous appreciations of him that were published in his lifetime, and indeed his own reflections on his career. In the months following his death in January 2011 a series of meetings was convened at which scholars spoke about his work, and the anniversary of his death was marked by a symposium in Istanbul to celebrate his contributions to the understanding of Turkish Islamic art. Other great figures in the field of Islamic art have had their full meed of honour, with memorial services and colloquia, and tributes from the great and the good, as well as obituaries not only in academic journals, where one would expect to find them, but also in broadsheets. But the reaction to Oleg Grabar’s death has been at once more widespread and more profound than this. The sense that an era has ended runs through many of the comments made in both public and private. The obvious question – ‘why?’ – does not have a single obvious answer. It has several, and at times they may seem to contradict each other.

Read More: Oleg Grabar: The Scholarly Legacy, by Robert Hillenbrand

Corning Museum of Glass Mourns the Loss of Former Director David Whitehouse

19 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by StudiesIslamica in Scholars - United States

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David WhitehouseDavid 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.

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Washington University Issues Statement on Death of Melanie Michailidis

05 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by StudiesIslamica in Scholars - United States

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Melanie MichailidisThe 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.

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