UVA School of Architecture Selects Abbey Stockstill as Chair of Architectural History
The University of Virginia School of Architecture has appointed Abbey Stockstill as the new Chair of the Architectural History Department. Currently an Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture in the Department of Art History at Southern Methodist University’s Meadows School of Art, Stockstill will assume the role on August 25, 2025.
Stockstill comes to the University with a rich background in scholarship and demonstrated capacity in teaching and academic leadership. Her research investigates the intersection of architecture, landscape, urbanism and identity in the medieval Mediterranean, particularly in the region of the Islamic West known as the Maghrib, comprising present-day Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.
She is the author of Marrakesh and the Mountains: Landscape, Urban Planning, and Identity in the Medieval Maghrib, which was published as part of the prestigious “Buildings, Landscapes, and Societies” series with Pennsylvania State University Press in 2024. In it, she traces the emergence of Marrakesh as an Afro-Mediterranean urban center, exploring the dynamic interactions among the city’s monuments and its landscape during a period of significant transformation. The title which has been described as “beautifully written and deeply researched” was supported by multiple fellowships and awards, including by the Garden and Landscape Studies program at Dumbarton Oaks, the Barakat Trust, the International Center for Medieval Art, and the American Institute for Maghrib Studies. Most recently, Stockstill was named a Paul Mellon Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Visual Arts by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
“Professor Stockstill’s research and scholarship has been recognized, in particular, for its strengths in interdisciplinarity, combining architectural history, urban analysis and environmental studies.” said Malo A. Hutson, Dean of the School of Architecture. “This approach to her research and teaching will enrich the UVA School of Architecture and foster important collaborations across our disciplines and beyond. I am grateful to the members of the search committee, led by Professor Sheila Crane, for their leadership in bringing Abbey to the A-School and our larger university community.”
Stockstill is widely published in a range of academic and disciplinary journals, and has contributed essays to the publications: Textile in Architecture: From the Middle Ages to Modernism (Routledge, 2023) and The Friday Mosque in the City: Liminality, Ritual, and Politics (Intellect, 2020). Her teaching includes undergraduate and graduate level courses in architectural history including “Architecture of the Islamic World” (ARHS 1319), “Heaven on Earth: Art, Order, and Environmentalism in the Islamic Garden” (ARHS 3322), “The Art & Cultures of Medieval Spain” (ARHS 3324), and “The Medieval Walled City” (ARHS 6321).
Associate Professor of Architectural History and chair of the search committee Sheila Crane echoed Hutson’s enthusiasm about the hire. “We are thrilled to have Abbey Stockstill join us at UVA. Her deep knowledge of the Arabic language, combined with her distinctive scholarship in medieval architecture, landscape, and urbanism across and beyond the Western Mediterranean, make her uniquely qualified to teach histories of the built environment that complement and significantly expand our current areas of expertise.”
Stockstill received a Bachelor of Art in Near Eastern Languages and Civilization with a concentration in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011, and a PhD in History of Art and Architecture with a concentration in Islamic Art from Harvard University in 2018. Her dissertation titled “The Mountains, the Mosque & the Red City: ‘Abd al-Mu’min and the Almohad Legacy in Marrakesh” provided a foundation for her ongoing scholarship on Marrakesh’s central place in the study of premodern urbanism.
As an evolution of that work and supported in part by her recent fellowship with the Center for Advanced Study in Visual Arts, Stockstill is currently developing research that explores the relationship between the history of science and aesthetics in the medieval world, articulating a critical theory of color in Islamic architecture. This scholarship is also enriched by her role as a consultant for the exhibition “Lumen: The Art and Science of Light, 800 – 1600,” that was recently on view (September - December 2024) at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
“I am thrilled to be joining the A-School and the Department of Architectural History. Not only is the faculty’s research truly innovative, but the department as a whole is continually considering the real-world impact of their work,” said Abbey Stockstill. “It’s so exciting to be a part of that, of reminding people how understanding the past can help us address contemporary questions about environmentalism, urban space, and so much more.”