Free; open to the public; register here. 

The McMullen Museum welcomes Dana Sajdi, professor of history at Boston College, for a discussion of her latest book project. Landscaping Medieval Damascus charts the history of a continuous tradition of representing the city in local prose, which began in the twelfth century and continued until the modern period.  Comparing this textual tradition to its European counterparts of painted landscapes, the talk explores the relentless and defensive nature of the tradition and shows it to be a practice of cityscaping in words. 

Dana Sajdi (PhD, Columbia University, 2002) is associate professor of history at Boston College. She is the author of The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant (2013, Turkish and Arabic translations in 2018); editor of Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century (2008, in Turkish 2014) and coeditor of Transforming Loss into Beauty: Essays in Arabic Literature and Culture in Memory of Madga Al-Nowaihi (2008). She is the recipient of several fellowships including from Princeton University, Wissenschfatskolleg zu Berlin (EUME); Research Center for Anatolian Civilization; MIT-Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture; and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.