Knowledge and the City: Redefining Islamic Urbanism, 762–1067
My dissertation-to-book project reveals how early Islamic thinkers understood the development of cities, the function of urban administration, and the application of law. By examining medieval Islamic philosophical and political texts, I argue that the rapid urbanization of the Islamic world in its first five centuries can be attributed in part to the development of a class of legal scholars who functioned as independent urban administrators. The project contributes to Islamic intellectual history, Islamic material histories, and histories of premodern urbanism.
I am currently preparing this manuscript for submission to academic presses in Fall 2026.
Al-Farabi’s cumulative model of human associations.
Archival clipping from the personal papers of the architect William Tapia Chuaquí of an advertisement for Madeco copper company featuring La Mezquita As-Salam (labelled ‘La Mezquita al-Nur’), originally printed in El Mercurio June 20, 1991. Courtesy of William Tapia Chuaquí.
Independent and/or Instrumentalized: Surveying Mosque Architecture in Chile (1986–2006)
Whether independent or instrumentalized, the case of Chile’s three mosques allows us an architectural lens through which to examine the diversity of actors who employ, often via novel means, Islamic architecture for their own ends. To fully understand the potency and valences of mosque architecture in the twentieth-first century – when architecture and its origins are constantly reinterpreted and reimagined – it is necessary to treat the mosque as a flexible carrier of meaning and form, always the product of its many actors.
This article will be published by the University of Chicago Press in Fall 2025 in the volume Islamic and Islamicate Architecture in the Americas: Transregional Dialogues and Manifestations (edited by Caroline ‘Olivia’ Wolf).
Quṣayr ʿAmra
The Umayyad prince al-Walid ibn Yazid ibn ʿAbd al-Malik (later the caliph “al-Walid II”) was known during and after his life as a hedonist. His most famous architectural commission, Quṣayr ʿAmra—with its frescoes of nude women and animals playing music—seems to corroborate this reputation. But a closer look at the structure’s site and decorative program reveals how an Umayyad prince imagined the world and his place in it.
I recently published this piece of public scholarship on Smarthistory.
“Bathing beauty,” fresco on west wall of reception hall (detail), Quṣayr ʿAmra, Jordan, 724–744 C.E. (Umayyad), stone masonry, interior decorated with wall frescoes and mosaic floors, patron: the prince al-Walid ibn Yazid ibn ʿAbd al-Malik (photo: MCID Columbia University)
Sphero-conical vessel, probably from Egypt, tenth–twelfth century. Earthenware, molded; height: 4 ₃/₄ inches (12.06 cm); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Madina Collection of Islamic Art, gift of Camilla Chandler Frost (M.2002.1.126). (Photo: Courtney Lesoon)
The Sphero-conical as Apothecary Vessel: An Argument for Dedicated Use
Sphero-conical vessels are ubiquitous in the archaeological record, but their intended use has remained a conundrum. Faced with a seemingly contradictory body of evidence, scholars have concluded that the sphero-conical vessel must have been a multi-use object. I disagree. This study offers a theory of dedicated use: the sphero-conical vessel was intended and produced to store pharmaceuticals, specifically apothecary compounds in personal-use dosages.
This essay was awarded the 2021 Historians of Islamic Art Association’s Margaret B. Ševčenko Prize for “the best unpublished essay written by a junior scholar.” It is now published in Muqarnas 39.