Monthly Archives: March 2022

AKDC Program Head to edit volume on the topic of restitution of cultural artifacts

AKDC Program Head Dr. Nur Sobers-Khan is one of the curators of §RETURN, HEAL, REDISTRIBUTE, an upcoming issue of ROOTS§ROUTES a multilingual, independent quarterly magazine of visual culture published in Italy. The focus of the issue curated by Dr. Sobers-Khan, Domenico Sergi, Anna Chiara Cimoli and Giulia Grechi is Restitution, an important and timely issue in contemporary museum practice, the debate of which often serves to expose “deeply rooted colonial epistemologies.” In Europe and the US, “one of the most frequent objections to restitution is the weak scientific infrastructure of the communities where objects would be returned,” a premise that […]

AKDC Seeks Applications for Collections Curator

The Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT is seeking applications for the position of Collections Curator, a versatile and exciting new role for a specialist in Islamic art and/or architecture who will be responsible for researching AKDC’s extensive physical collections and making them accessible to a range of audiences. The Collections Curator will lead projects describing and disseminating the unique archival holdings the center, creating and developing collaborative projects of a scholarly nature, and generating public events and projects around the collections. The role will also design and carry out workflows that document, preserve, and render our collections accessible and […]

AKDC Staff Contribute to New Book on the Religious Architecture of Islam

Matt Saba (Visual Resources Librarian at AKDC) and Michael Toler (Archnet Content Manager) have contributed two essays to The Religious Architecture of Islam, an encyclopedic, multi-author study of mosques, madrasas, saints’ shrines, and funerary architecture associated with the religion of Islam. The book aims to be global in scale, and its first volume—published in November 2021—covers Asia and Australia, while a forthcoming volume will cover Africa, Europe, and the Americas. The two-volume series is published by Brepols and edited by Hasan-Uddin Khan and Kathryn Moore. Matt contributed an essay on funerary architecture in Iraq under the Abbasids and their successor […]