Dr Fabio Eugenio Betti obtained a PhD in Archaeology at the University of Perugia. He has been research fellow both for the Ministry of Education and the Institute of Philosophical Studies in Naples. Since 2008 he has been teaching History of Classical Tradition in the Byzantine and Sassanid eras at the School of Archaeology, University of Milan. His main research area concerns techniques, iconography and ideology of ancient sumptuary art. His current research focuses on the relationship between East and West in Arabia Felix, the influence of the Hellenistic-Roman tradition on South Arabian glyptic art, and the rediscovery of Oriental Antiquities by European travellers. Lecture title: “The Jewellery Worn by…

Dr. Samir Mahmoud : ‘New perspectives on Islamic art: How and why does non-figurative art move us and evoke an emotion?’ The lecture explored a wide ranging array of interdisciplinary perspectives that try to answer this one question: How and why does non-figurative art move us and evoke an emotion? He will drew on some medieval Islamic textual sources in addition to contemporary neurosciences, phenomenology, art history, and psychology to form a dialogue across the centuries that centres on the perceptual qualities of non-figurative art (geometry, vegetal motifs, and to a certain extent calligraphy). He then explored the question of an Islamic prohibition on creating images of livings things from…

Dr. Michel Mouton is an archaeologist, the Director of scientific research at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), director of the French Center for Archaeology and Social Sciences in the Arabian peninsula. He is the former director of the French archaeological expedition in Sharjah (1991-1999), the French archaeological expedition in Hadramawt (1995-2006) and the Early Petra German-French project of the ANR-DFG in Jordan (2008-2011).  

Gianfranco Armando graduated in modern history from the University of Turin, with a dissertation on the French revolutionary press, and continued his education in Rome, where he studied theology and Church history at the Pontifical Gregorian University. He has been the archivist and advisor at the Vatican Secret Archives since 2004, where he has been responsible for indexing several archival holdings. He has also published extensively in Church history and archival studies. Title of the lecture is “Discovering the Vatican Secret Archives”  

Dr. Agnes Stillfried is a Curator of Education and Communication at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna. She has published on various aspects of Baroque Art, contributed to a number of museum catalogues and publications, and has taught courses in Art History as an adjunct professor both at the American University in Cairo and at the American University in Kuwait. In her lecture, she expanded on the topic: “Western perceptions of the Ottoman East: Selected Renaissance artworks from the collections of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna”. The collections of the Kunsthistorisches Museum were assembled over five centuries by the Habsburgs, Austria’s former imperial family. Though much of their long common history was marked…

The title of tonight lecture is ‘The forgotten century of Persian carpets’ This lecture will address the subject of carpet production in Iran in the150 years following the downfall of the Safavid Empire. The importance of this period is that the carpets were entirely woven to meet local and domestic demand, rather than to pander and cater to international tastes. In parallel, this was a lengthy period where trends and styles were formulated by the more rural and provincial sectors of society rather than by the dominant urban workshops

Dr. Souad T. Ali, a Fulbright Scholar, is the Founding Chair of the Council for Arabic and Islamic Studies at Arizona State University (ASU) and served as Head of Classics and Middle East Studies. “A Focus on the Peaceful Message of the Qur’an: Engendering Peace through female roles.”      

Lecture entitled ” The Religious Dimensions of dream interpretation in classical Islam” by Professor Pierre Lory. Prof. Pierre Lory is the Professor of religious studies, Chair of Islamic Mysticism, department in Sorbonne’s Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. He is the author of nine books concentrating on mysticism in Islamic culture and more than 150 articles in scientific journals and chapters in collective books. Muslim tradition has developed a substantially uniform doctrine and attitude. An “orthodox” oneirocriticism, which was the topic of this lecture.  

Lecture: “Pioneer with Paint&Palette: Life of Tareq Rajab” by Ziad Rajab. Dr. Ziad Rajab is the director of the New English School and a Tareq Rajab Museum board member. In addition to being a human resource specialist, he is involved in the arts and has non-professional certifications in book-binding, illumination, portraiture, oil painting and pottery as well as being an accomplished flautist.