Yara Saqfalhait

Yara Saqfalhait is a Doctoral Candidate in Architecture at Columbia University GSAPP. Her research addresses the interconnected histories of architecture, political economy, state administration, and building technologies with a particular focus on the late Ottoman empire and modern Middle East. Her dissertation traces how architectural production and building procedures mediated novel forms of statecraft and an expanding market economy in the late Ottoman empire by focusing on transformations in the building activities of three bureaucracies central to territorial consolidation: The Privy Purse, The Customs Administration, and The Ministry of Pious Foundations (Waqfs). Other ongoing research focuses on the interplay between the histories of aesthetics and political economy in the writings of the Armenian bureaucrat Sakızlı Ohannes Efendi. She was trained in architectural engineering at Birzeit University in Palestine, and earned an MDes in history and philosophy of design from Harvard University. Her work has been supported by The Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, The Graham Foundation, and The Buell Center, and her writings appeared in The Avery Review and Bidayat, among other publications.