Gülru Necipoğlu

Gülru Necipoğlu (born 3 April 1956 in Istanbul) is a Turkish American professor of Islamic Art/Architecture. She has been the Aga Khan Professor and Director of the [https://agakhan.fas.harvard.edu Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture] at Harvard University since 1993, where she started teaching as Assistant Professor in 1987. She received her Harvard Ph.D. in the Department of History of Art and Architecture (1986), her BA in Art History at Wesleyan (Summa Cum Laude, 1979), her high school degree in Robert College, Istanbul (1975). She is married to the Ottoman historian and Harvard University professor Cemal Kafadar. Her sister is the historian Nevra Necipoğlu.

Necipoğlu is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, and [https://www.palladiomuseum.org Centro Internazionale di Studi di Archittettura Andrea Palladio] in Vicenza. She was an invited faculty scholar at Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz-Max-Planck-Institut (2013, 2014), and the Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge (2013). Her prize-winning books are: ''The Arts of Ornamental Geometry'' (2017); ''The Age of Sinan'' (2005), ''The Topkapı Scroll'' (1996). Her books and numerous essays have appeared in English, Turkish, French, Spanish, Persian, and Arabic.

Necipoğlu specializes in premodern Islamic arts/architecture, especially the Mediterranean and Eastern Islamic lands. Her publications address aesthetic cosmopolitanism, transregional connectivity between early modern empires (Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal), artistic exchanges with Byzantium and Renaissance Europe, plans, and drawings in pre-modern architectural practice, aesthetics of abstraction, and geometric ornament. Her critical interests encompass methodological and historiographical issues in modern constructions of the field of Islamic art and Orientalism. Provided by Wikipedia