Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Nasser D. Khalili Professor of Islamic Art and Archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, will give the annual Harry W. Porter, Jr. Visiting Professor Lecture. 

Behrens-Abouseif’s lecture, “Memory and Architecture in Premodern Islamic Culture,” will discuss how the monument and the book have been viewed since most ancient times as rivals in commemorating cultures and patrons of the past, and how this notion continued to persist and be cultivated with new ideas in medieval Islamic culture, where it also had a significant impact on Islamic architecture.   

Behrens-Abouseif received her MA in Islamic Art from the American University in Cairo, her PhD at the University in Hamburg, and her post-doctoral degree at the University of Freiburg in Germany.

She is a specialist in Mamluk and Ottoman arts of Egypt and Syria and in social history. Her research interests include urbanism and waqf history, Islamic cultural history and concepts of aesthetics, the decorative arts of Islam and later Islamic painting. More recently her research has been focused on the reception of pre-Islamic monuments in Islamic culture and on Islamic concepts of urbanism, arts and aesthetics.