Kishwar Rizvi appointed Robert Lehman Professor
Kishwar Rizvi, a leader in the study of art and the built environment in Islamic cultures, has been appointed the Robert Lehman Professor in the History of Art, Islamic Art and Architecture, effective July 1.
She is a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the Department of the History of Art and is a faculty member of the Yale School of Architecture.
Rizvi has been a member of the Yale faculty since 2006. She previously held a faculty appointment at Barnard College., In Spring 2022 she was the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Visiting Professor at I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.
She conducts fieldwork in several parts of the Middle East and South Asia, including Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates. She is the author of two acclaimed monographs. The first, “The Safavid Dynastic Shrine: Architecture, Religion and Power in Early Modern Iran,” (2011) revealed how the transition from a devotional aesthetic to an imperial one represented dynastic aspirations, affecting a wide range of public buildings across Iran. The second, “The Transnational Mosque: Architecture and Historical Memory in the Contemporary Middle East,” sheds light on the role of mosques in contemporary Islamic identity and on the connection between religious praxis and national ideologies. A field-defining achievement, “The Transitional Mosque” received awards from the American Library Association and the College Art Association, as well as Yale’s Gustav Ranis International Book Prize.
In addition, Rizvi has edited two volumes of essays: “Modernism and the Middle East: Architecture and Politics in the Twentieth Century” (2008) and “Affect, Emotion, and Subjectivity in Early Modern Muslim Empires” (2017). Her forthcoming book, “Imagining a World: Artistic and Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Iran” , considers the ways in which early modern subjects — be they rulers, artists, or diplomats — imagined their place within an interconnected world; and in which artworks demonstrated, even enabled, changing conceptions of selfhood. Rizvi also has published articles in major journals in the fields of art history and history of architecture, and has contributed opinion pieces to CNN, The Washington Post, and WBUR. She is currently the acquisitions editor of Platform, a digital publication about buildings and spaces, and the associate editor of the Iranian Studies Journal.
Her work has been recognized with the Aga Khan Fellowship in Islamic Art and Architecture, and fellowships and grants from the Carnegie, Graham, and Mellon Foundations. Recent speaking engagements have taken her to Harvard, Columbia, UCLA, Cornell, the Getty Center, and other institutions across the country and around the world.
Rizvi is currently president of the Historians of Islamic Art Association and has served on the board of the International Journal of Middle East Studies and the International Society for Iranian Studies, helping to set agendas in these interdisciplinary fields. At Yale, she is a member of the Council on Middle East Studies and of the Council on South Asian Studies. During her tenure as chair, the Council on Middle East Studies was awarded the prestigious Title VI Award from the U.S. Department of Education which funded public programing and outreach at Yale and in New Haven. She was the chair of the Committee on Teaching and Learning and has served on the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the 320 York Planning Committee, and other university bodies. In the Department of the History of Art, she served as Director of Undergraduate Studies and chair of the Admissions Review Committee. In the latter capacity, she helped to transform graduate admissions processes in the department in the interests of fostering a diverse academic community. A sought-after mentor and advisor, Rizvi teaches courses in museum studies, art and architecture of the Middle East, critical and theoretical approaches to the history of art, and other topics.
Rizvi earned her Ph.D. from MIT, a Master of Architecture degree from the University Pennsylvania, and a bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University.
