Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art Awards Lifetime Achievement Medal for Contributions in Asian Art goes to Gülru Necipoğlu
The National Museum of Asian Art has announced its 2023 recipients of the Freer Medal, a lifetime achievement award that honors individuals who have substantially contributed to the understanding of the arts of Asia throughout their career. This year, the institution’s centennial, the honor will go to Vidya Dehejia, the Barbara Stoler Miller Professor Emerita of Indian and South Asian Art at Columbia University, and Gülru Necipoğlu, the Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University’s History of Art and Architecture Department. They will be honored for their lifetime work in South Asian art and arts of the Islamic world, respectively. The medal will be presented to Dehejia April 28 and to Necipoğlu Oct. 27.
Named after the museum’s founder, Charles Lang Freer, the Freer Medal has been awarded 14 times since its inception in 1956. This is the first time that a scholar of South Asian and another of Middle Eastern descent will receive the award. Only two other women have previously received the Freer Medal: It was awarded to Dame Jessica Rawson, professor of Chinese art and archaeology at the University of Oxford, in 2017 and to Stella Kramrisch, Czech art historian and leading specialist on South Asian art, in 1985.
“The Freer Medal is an important way in which our museum encourages and exemplifies excellence in Asian art scholarship,” said Chase F. Robinson, Dame Jillian Sackler Director of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art, the National Museum of Asian Art. “We are pleased to recognize the enormous contributions that these scholars have made to their fields. It is long overdue that women of Middle Eastern and Asian heritages receive the Freer Medal. The museum congratulates Vidya Dehejia and Gülru Necipoğlu on this award during the landmark occasion of our centennial.”
Continue reading online announcement here; See the event on the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art YouTube Channel.
The International Journal of Islamic Architecture (IJIA) announces the winners of the Professor Hasan-Uddin Khan Article Award
The International Journal of Islamic Architecture and the Award Jury is pleased to announce the 2022 winners of the Professor Hasan-Uddin Khan Article Award.
Award Winner: Laura Parodi, "Kabul, a Forgotten Mughal Capital: Gardens, City, and Court at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century," Muqarnas 38, 2021, pp. 79-119
Honourable Mention: Mikael Muehlbauer, "From Stone to Dust: The Life of the Kufic Inscribed Frieze of Wuqro Cherqos in Tigray, Ethiopia," Muqarnas 38, 2021, pp. 1-34
In honour of Professor Hasan-Uddin Khan’s contributions to the field of Islamic architecture, the International Journal of Islamic Architecture (IJIA) is pleased to offer this award in recognition of ground-breaking scholarship on the subject published in peer-reviewed journals. The Award winner will receive a cash prize of $1000 and a 2-year subscription to IJIA, and the honourable mention winner will receive a 2-year subscription to IJIA. We are extremely grateful to the members of the 2022 jury, Professors Renata Holod, Abidin Kusno, and D. Fairchild Ruggles, for their time and expertise in judging submissions for the inaugural award, and to the chair of the Award committee, Mehreen Chida-Razvi.
The Professor Hasan-Uddin Khan Article Award will be offered every two years. Papers published in English in a peer reviewed journal in 2022 or 2023 will be eligible for the 2024 award. For the criteria by which papers will be judged and the submission process, see the IJIA website. The Press Release for these awards is here.
Read more about Muqarnas here.
Two recent awards for Professor Gülru Necipoğlu
Congratulations to Professor Gülru Necipoğlu for winning an honorable mention at the Middle East Librarians’ Association (MELA). This was awarded for the Muqarnas supplement she co-authored with Professors Cemal Kafadar and Cornell H. Fleischer, titled “Treasures of Knowledge: An Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3-1503/4)”
“The subject of this two-volume publication is an inventory of manuscripts in the book treasury of the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, commissioned by the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II from his royal librarian ʿAtufi in the year 908 (1502–3) and transcribed in a clean copy in 909 (1503–4). This unicum inventory preserved in the Oriental Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Könyvtára Keleti Gyűjtemény, MS Török F. 59) records over 5,000 volumes, and more than 7,000 titles, on virtually every branch of human erudition at the time. The Ottoman palace library housed an unmatched encyclopedic collection of learning and literature; hence, the publication of this unique inventory opens a larger conversation about Ottoman and Islamic intellectual/cultural history. The very creation of such a systematically ordered inventory of books raises broad questions about knowledge production and practices of collecting, readership, librarianship, and the arts of the book at the dawn of the sixteenth century.
The first volume contains twenty-eight interpretative essays on this fascinating document, authored by a team of scholars from diverse disciplines, including Islamic and Ottoman history, history of science, arts of the book and codicology, agriculture, medicine, astrology, astronomy, occultism, mathematics, philosophy, theology, law, mysticism, political thought, ethics, literature (Arabic, Persian, Turkish/Turkic), philology, and epistolary. Following the first three essays by the editors on implications of the library inventory as a whole, the other essays focus on particular fields of knowledge under which books are catalogued in MS Török F. 59, each accompanied by annotated lists of entries. The second volume presents a transliteration of the Arabic manuscript, which also features an Ottoman Turkish preface on method, together with a reduced-scale facsimile.”
Find out more on the MELA website
Professor Necipoğlu also recently won a lifelong achievement award for her “Contribution to Architecture” (Mimarlığa Katkı), at the 14th Annual Architecture Awards, by the Turkish Professional Architects Association (Türk Serbest Mimarlar Derneği). Read the announcement (in Turkish) or visit the Türk Serbest Mimarlar Derneği website.
HIAA Fall 2021 Newsletter, interview with Gülru Necipoğlu
Visit the HIAA website
András Riedlmayer retires as AKPIA Bibliographer
András Riedlmayer, Bibliographer in Islamic Art and Architecture, has directed the Documentation Center of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard’s Fine Arts Library, building world-class collections while supporting teaching and research on the history of art and architecture of Islamic societies since 1985.
A native of Hungary, András is a specialist in the history and culture of the Ottoman Balkans, spending the past 25 years documenting the destruction of manuscript libraries and other cultural heritage during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. He has testified about his findings as an expert witness before the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). He has published extensively on the study of Ottoman manuscripts, on the Islamic heritage of the Balkans, and its history and its fate in time of armed conflict. András has also been invited to present papers at international academic symposia and conferences. He is a co-founder of the Bosnian Manuscript Ingathering Project, an international effort to trace and recover photocopies representing some of the thousands of manuscripts that were destroyed when Bosnian libraries were burned during the 1990s. In 2018, he was awarded the David H. Partington Award from the Middle East Librarians Association, given to members who have displayed a high standard of excellence and accomplishments in the field of Middle East librarianship.
In anticipation of his retirement at the end of the Fall 2020 semester, the library hosted an online celebration of András, complete with tributes, presentations, and words of thanks. András has been an invaluable resource to generations of students, fellows, faculty and staff members at AKPIA, and the History of Art and Architecture department. His expertise, enthusiasm and good humor have influenced many who have passed through Harvard University, and he will be sorely missed. From all of us in AKPIA, thank you András, and congratulations on your well-deserved retirement! (December 2020)
The British Academy welcomes new Fellow Gülru Necipoğlu
The British Academy has elected Professor Gülru Necipoğlu as a Corresponding Fellow at the Annual General Meeting on July 23, 2020. She is one of 86 new Fellows welcomed this year. As a Corresponding Fellow, Professor Necipoğlu is affiliated with the disciplinary section History of Art and Music. Sections meet twice a year and discuss a range of matters about the Academy and the disciplines; they also conduct electoral business.
The British Academy is the UK’s leading organization for the humanities and social sciences – as a Fellowship, as a funding body, and as a forum for debate and engagement. Their purpose is to deepen understanding of people, societies and cultures, enabling everyone to learn, progress and prosper. The Academy, founded in 1902, currently boasts a fellowship of 1,400 leading UK national and international academics, elected for their distinction in the humanities and social sciences. As a charity, the British Academy is funded in part by government, philanthropy, and donations from its members. Through the diversity of their funding, the Academy aims to retain their independence so that they can continue to inspire, support, and promote outstanding achievement and global advances in the humanities and social sciences. For more information about the British Academy, please see their New Fellow Announcement, or their website.
Harvard librarian puts this war crime on the map: András Riedlmayer catalogued years of cultural heritage destruction by Serbian nationalists in the Balkans
Harvard Gazette, February 21, 2020. To read article, click here
Gülru Necipoğlu's The Arts of Ornamental Geometry: A Persian Compendium on Similar and Complementary Interlocking Figures is an award winner for the 26th World Award for Book of the Year of Iran
February 2019: The Ministry of Culture, Deputy of Cultural Affairs, and The Secretariat of the 26th World Award for Book of the Year of the Islamic Republic of Iran are pleased to announce that The Arts of Ornamental Geometry: A Persian Compendium on Similar and Complementary Interlocking Figures (Brill, 2017) by Professor Gülru Necipoğlu of Harvard University, has been selected as one of the best new works in the field of Islamic / Iranian Studies.
On Tuesday February 5, 2019 an Award Ceremony was held in Tehran Iran, in which all the selected distinguished works and their authors were honored. This year, after the primary selection of more than 2,700 books in different fields of Islamic and Iranian Studies, 244 books were assessed, from which 9 books were selected as winners. The evaluated books have been written in English, French, German, Italian, Arabic, Georgian, Chinese, Greek, Turkish, Bengali and Finnish languages. The winners are from Germany, Russia, Lebanon, Italy, Ireland, Turkey and the USA.
The “World Book Award of the Year” winners are:
Gülru Necipoğlu. The Arts of Ornamental Geometry: A Persian Compendium on Similar and Complementary Interlocking Figures. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2017
Allessandra Lazzari, Masasimo Vidale. Lapis Lazuli Bead Making at Shahr-I Sokhta: Interpreting Craft Production in the Urban Community of the 3rd Millennium BC. Rome: ISMEO (Italian Institute for Middle and Far East), 2017
Alexander Knysh. Sufism: A New History of Islamic Mysticism. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017
Maurice A. Pomerantz. Licit Magic: The Life and Letters of al-Sahib b. Abbad (d. 385/995). Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2017
Moya Carey. Persian Art: Collecting the Arts of Iran for the V&A. London: V&A Publishing (Victoria and Albert Museum), 2018
George Archer. A Place Between Two Places: The Quranic Barzakh. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2017
Hussein Ali Abdulsater. Shi’i Doctrine, Mu’tazili Theology: al-Sharif al-Murtaa and Imami Discourse. Edinburgh University Press, 2017
Yousef Casewit. The Mystics of al-Andalus: Ibn Barrajan and Islamic Thought in the Twelfth Century. Cambridge University Press, 2017
Juliane Müller. Nahrungsmittel in der arabischen Medizin: Das Kitab al-Aiya wa-l-asriba des Naib ad-Din as-Samarqandi. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2017
The World Book Award homepage was here: http://www.bookaward.ir/Home-En. The page dedicated to The Arts of Ornamental Geometry: A Persian Compendium on Similar and Complementary Interlocking Figures was here: http://www.bookaward.ir/BookDetails-En/3151/26/The-Arts-of-Ornamental-Ge.... Click here for the event's printed program (in English). Click here for the publisher's website (Brill).
Steering Committee for Aga Khan Award for Architecture's 13th Cycle Announced
The Aga Khan Award for Architecture has announced the members of the Steering Committee for the Thirteenth Award Cycle (2014 – 2016). Established in 1977, the Award is given every three years to projects that set new standards of excellence in architecture, planning practices, historic preservation and landscape architecture. The Steering Committee is chaired by His Highness the Aga Khan. Farrokh Derakhshani is the Director of the Award.
The Steering Committee is the governing body of the Award. It is responsible for establishing the eligibility criteria for project nominations, providing thematic direction to the Award, and developing plans for its cyclical and long-term future. For each Award cycle, the Steering Committee appoints an independent Master Jury to select the award recipients from the nominated projects. The Award seeks projects that represent the broadest possible range of architectural interventions, with particular attention given to building schemes that use local resources and appropriate technology in innovative ways, and those that are likely to inspire similar efforts elsewhere. Projects can be anywhere in the world, but must successfully address the needs and aspirations of societies in which Muslims have a significant presence. The Aga Khan Award for Architecture has a prize fund of US$ 1 million. The rigor of its nomination and selection process has made it, in the eyes of many observers, one of the world’s most influential architectural prizes. Projects that have received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture include the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the Central Market of Koudougou, Burkina Faso, the rehabilitation of the Walled City of Nicosia in Cyprus and the Salaam Cardiac Surgery Centre in Khartoum, Sudan.
For more information, please visit the website
Gülru Necipoğlu at the opening session of the 15th International Congress of Turkish Art. Naples, Italy
Gülru Necipoğlu (front row, second from right) at the opening session of the 15th “International Congress of Turkish Art," held in Naples, 16-18 September 2015, and hosted by the Oriental Studies Department of the University of Naples (Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”).
To see the Conference Program, click here
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Gülru Necipoğlu travel, Summer 2015
Gülru Necipoğlu, Horezi Monastery, Romania. June 2015
Gülru Necipoğlu and Ioli Kalavrezou in a group photograph, Bucharest conference, organized by Alina Payne, sponsored by the Getty Program. June 2015
Gülru Necipoğlu in Bulgaria with art historian and historian colleagues, Sarafina-Haus, Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria. June 2015
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Gülru Necipoğlu was invited to lecture for the Universität Zürich History Department Summer School in İstanbul: "Master of Advanced Studies in Applied History," directed by Prof. Maurus Reinkowski, titled “The Topkapı Palace in Istanbul: Center of Ottoman Imperial Rule,” followed by Gülru giving a tour of the palace itself. June 6, 2015.
Gülru Necipoğlu named one of the 30 Most Influential Turkish-American Women by TURKOFAMERICA (Summer 2015)
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Turk Of America is a quarterly magazine, founded in 2002. The magazine is the first Turkish American nationwide business magazine and its mission is to report news about the Turkish-American community in the U.S. The magazine's content includes primarily the lives of Turkish people in the U.S. and their social, cultural and economic activities as well as the activities of Americans who are related in any way with Turkey or the Turkish community.
Gülru Necipoğlu article in Arredamento Architecture magazine (February 2015)
For twenty years Arredamento Architecture has been Turkey's leading architectural magazine
Gülru Necipoğlu featured in Hürriyet newspaper (October 2014)
Gulru Necipoglu lecture at NYU Institute of Fine Arts
October 2, 2014
NYU Institute of Fine Arts Lecture Series
Points of Contact: New Approaches to Islamic Art
Gülru Necipoğlu, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University.
Persianate Images Between Europe and China: The "Frankish Manner" in the Diez and Topkapı Albums, ca. 1350-1450
Gülru Necipoğlu interviewed for Turkish Airlines' in-flight magazine Skylife
Gülru Necipoğlu interviewed for Turkish Airlines' in-flight magazine Skylife (February 2014). The read the interview in English, click here. To read the interview in Turkish, click here.