Abbey Stockstill
Education
BA in Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, University of Pennsylvania
PhD in History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University
Biography
Abbey Stockstill is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Architectural History. She is also Director of the Graduate Program in Architectural History.
Stockstill's 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 publication 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.
Additionally, 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, particularly focused on Islamic art and architecture. Prior to joining UVA, Stockstill was Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture in the Department of Art History at Southern Methodist University’s Meadows School of Art.
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 Paul Mellon Senior Fellowship with the Center for Advanced Study in Visual Arts in Washington, D.C., 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 on view in 2024 at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
