Nasser Rabbat

Nasser Rabbat is an architect and historian whose work moves across the cities, centuries, and cultures of the Islamic Mediterranean with the curiosity of a time traveler. Based at MIT, his research ranges from Islamic architecture and urbanism to colonialism, Orientalism, heritage issues, and the ways memory and power make and unmake cities. He has written extensively on Egypt, Syria, al-Andalus, the Arabian Gulf, and the broader Islamic world, always with an eye for how buildings carry stories, losses, and hopes across time. Before MIT, he worked as an architect in Los Angeles and Damascus, and over the years his research and lectures have taken him through North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia. He regularly writes in both scholarly and public venues, bringing together history, architecture, and cultural reflection with the sensibility of someone who reads landscapes as carefully as texts. He has published a number of award-winning books, the last of which is Writing Egypt: Al-Maqrizi and His Historical Project. He is currently completing a historical novel based in 13th-century Damascus, his native city.

Language spoken: English