Tag Archives: Matt Saba

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 […]

AKDC Staff participating in panel on Digital Humanities + Islamic Visual Culture in the annual conference of the College Art Association

Matt Saba, AKDC Visual Resources Librarian, a and Glaire Anderson, Senior Lecturer in Islamic Art at the University of Edinburgh, have organized and will chair a panel on Digital Humanities + Islamic Visual Culture for the 109th Annual Conference of the College Art Association to be held online February 10-13, 2021. The panel is sponsored by the Historians of Islamic Art Association (HIAA). The panel includes 4 presentations: “Soft Eyes: Software’s Visualities and Islamic Art History in the Digital Age” by Hussein Keshani, The University of British Columbia “Animating an Amulet: 3D Modeling, Materiality, and a Medieval Arabic Amulet Scroll” […]

AKDC Visual Resources Librarian to lecture on Palace Building and Poetry at Abbasid Samarra

Dr. Matt Saba, Visual Resources Librarian in the Aga Khan Documentation Center, will speak on “Durability through Verse: Palace Building and Poetry at Abbasid Samarra,” at 6 pm on Monday, February 10 in 3-133 at MIT. The presentation “examines the relationship between palace building and poetry writing at Samarra, the capital of the Abbasid Empire in Iraq from 836 to 892 CE.” and is part of the Spring 2020 lectures of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. The series continues on February 24 with a presentation by Farrokh Derakhshani, Director of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, […]

Matt Saba speaks at conference hosted by the Sorbonne Université and Musée du Louvre

Matt Saba, Visual Resources Librarian for Islamic Architecture, AKDC@MIT, will participate in an international conference in Paris on October 3-4. The conference, hosted by the Sorbonne Université and Musée du Louvre, focuses on Islamic heritage through the lens of scholarly archives, and features a host of papers using archival collections to shed new light on questions in Islamic art and archaeology. Saba will speak on the subject of the historiography of Islamic architecture through the lens of the archives of Ernst Herzfeld, a German archaeologist whose archive is divided between a number of European and North American institutions. The conference […]

AKDC’s Visual Resources Librarian to present on marble decorations of Samarra

On May 9, AKDC’s Visual Resources Librarian Matt Saba delivers the weekly research seminar at the Khalili Research Centre For the Art and Material Culture of the Middle East, University of Oxford. Matt will speak about the architectural decorations made from marble excavated at the early Islamic palace-city of Samarra, located in Iraq. While Samarra is famous for its carved stucco revetments, its architectural marble is rarely discussed. One reason for its neglect is that much was lost, first in antiquity and also after the site’s initial excavation in 1911-14. An overdue survey of the way this and other semi-precious […]