Courtney Lesoon is Assistant Teaching Professor of Art History at Penn State. She is a historian of Islamic art, architecture, and urbanism. She earned her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was advised by Professor Nasser Rabbat in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. Her doctoral work was supported by the U.S. Department of Education's Fulbright-Hays program and the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Foundation. Her current book project, titled Knowledge and the City, explores how early Islamic thinkers conceived of and theorized urbanism.