Paintings from the Private Houses of Abbasid Samarra: A Reassessment

CMES and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University present a talk with

Fatma Dahmani
Harvard AKPIA Fellow, Assistant Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture, University of Qayrawan, Tunisia

Fatma Dahmani is a historian of Islamic art and architecture specializing in the early Islamic period and she is currently an AKPIA Fellow at Harvard University. She holds a PhD in history of art from the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, and has been Assistant Professor of History of Art at the University of Qayrawan (Kairouan) in Tunisia since 2020. She previously taught Islamic art and architecture at the INALCO-Paris (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales) and the American University of Beirut. She held a Barakat Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Oxford.

Dahmani has been working for several years on a reassessment of Abbasid finds from the Abbasid city of Samarra (Iraq) and on a thorough study of Ernst Herzfeld’s unpublished records related to his excavations of the city. Her current project, during the AKPIA fellowship, concerns a reassessment of the paintings uncovered in the private houses of Samarra and her ongoing book project reexamines the entire corpus of paintings uncovered in the Abbasid capital.

Contact: agakhan@fas.harvard.edu