I have been interested in questions about cultural heritage, the destruction of culture, and the ethics of museum collection and display for a long time, and they have become vital public debates in the last decade.
Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh
Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis. She researches the visual cultures of the Middle East, including issues of architectural preservation, museums, and cultural heritage. Her first book, The Image of an Ottoman City: Imperial Architecture and Urban Experience in Aleppo in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, received the Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. Her scholarly publications have also won the Best Article Prize from the Syrian Studies Association, and the Ömer Lütfi Barkan Article Prize from the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. She was the guest editor for a special issue of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, on “Cultural Heritage and the Arab Spring” (2016). Her new book, The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice, was published by Stanford University Press in 2019. In addition to her scholarship, her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, and was featured in a BBC series about cultural heritage lost during the current conflict in Syria.