Heghnar Watenpaugh - Ottoman Aleppo: Experiencing Architecture, Narrating Space

Heghnar Watenpaugh is an Associate Professor of Art History Urban and Architectural History in Islamic Societies at University of California, Davis. Her field of interest is urban and architectural history in Islamic societies, and issues of cultural heritage and controversies surrounding cultural property. Heghnar has been the recipient of numerous grants, including the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship for Syria and Turkey, the Social Science Research Council fellowship, the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities summer grant, and the J. Paul Getty Post-doctoral Fellowship in the History of Art and the Humanities. Her book, The Image of an Ottoman City: Imperial Architecture and Urban Experience in Aleppo in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, received the Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. Heghnar is currently writing a book, Ruins into Monuments, which concerns the cultural politics of the Middle East under French colonial rule in the 1920’s and 1930’s, in particular the process of “discovery,” study, preservation and commodification of architectural forms from the past, and its relationship to modernity, colonialism, and nationalism.