blc's

Urban Histories & Contested Geographies Consortium

Manu P. Sobti

The Urban Histories and Contested Geographies Consortium is directed by Dr. Manu P. Sobti - an Islamic architecture and urban historian, Associate Professor at the School of Architecture & Urban Planning (SARUP), University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee USA. He has a B.Arch from the School of Architecture - CEPT (Ahmedabad, India), a SMarchS. from MIT (Cambridge), and a Ph.D. from the College of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta). He trained with architects Josef Paul Kleihues, Dipl-ing. Architect - Berlin, Germany (1989-90) on multiple built works and projects for the IBA (Internationale Bau-Ausstellung) & Balkrishna V. Doshi, Architect/Urban Planner - Ahmedabad, India (1991-93) on the Bharat Diamond Bourse in Mumbai. Prof. Sobti’s ongoing research focuses on the urban history and conservation of early-medieval Islamic cities along the Silk Road and in the Indian Subcontinent, with particular reference to the complex ‘borderland geographies’ created by riverine landscapes.

Within the purview of his trans-disciplinary research project on the Mississippi, Danube, Ganges and Amu Darya Rivers, he is currently completing a manuscript entitled The Sliver of the Oxus Borderland: Medieval Cultural Encounters between the Arabs and Persians for Brill Publications (Leiden, Netherlands, forthcoming 2015). This work collates his noteworthy fieldwork in libraries, repositories and archives on the historical geo-politics of the Oxus River (Amu Darya) in Central Asia. The Oxus Borderland is also the subject of his ongoing film documentary project entitled Medieval Riverlogues (90 minutes, Public Television) that uniquely combines archival research with a re-drawn map series, computer-generated renderings and live footage from this cultural crucible.

His work on urban history and architecture has received several prestigious awards and fellowships. This includes the Trans-disciplinary Collaborative Research Award from the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2011–13), the Global Studies Research Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2010-11), the Hamid Bin Khalifa Research and Travel Fellowship for Islamic Architecture and Culture (2009), the Center for 21st Century Studies Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2009-10), the Aga Khan Graduate Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Cambridge (1993-95), and grants from the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research in Seattle (2009-10), the Graham Foundation of the Arts in Chicago (2008-09), the French Institute for Central Asian Studies in Tashkent (2000), and the Architectural Association in London (2001). He has also received multiple teaching and course development awards, including the BP-AMOCO Teaching Excellence Award at the Georgia Institute of Technology (2001), and the Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2011).

Sobti has published widely and presented his research at more than 60 national and international venues. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he co-coordinates the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures (blc) Doctoral Research Program in collaboration with the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, directs the India Urban Mapping Program (2008 - present), the Uzbekistan Foreign Studies Experience (2011 - present), and conducts Urban Design Studios in the cities of Ahmedabad, Chandigarh and New Orleans in partnership with local schools of architecture. Sobti’s research & teaching areas include - Urban History and the Conservation of Cultural Landscapes, Urban Design, Urban Typology and Morphology, Architectural History and Theory, Islamic and Non-Western Architecture and Urbanism, Russian Art and Architecture, Silk Road Studies, and Cognitive Design Processes. In Spring 2013, while a Research Fellow at the IRH-UW-Madison, Sobti taught a simulcast seminar on Islamic Architecture in UW-Madison’s Art History Program, supported by the James Watrous Fund and the Mellon Foundation. He is a continuing Honorary Fellow at the IRH-UW-Madison in 2014.

For additional information see here/ For more details on the Trans-disciplinary Project on Riverine Borderlands see here

Sahar Hosseini

Sahar Hosseini is a Phd Candidate in the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures PhD Program, School of Architecture and Urban Planning, UWM. She holds a Bachelors of Architecture and Masters of Landscape Architecture from the University of Tehran in Iran. Her research focuses on urban spaces and public institutions in pre-modern Persia and their metamorphosis during the passage to modernity. She is the co-author (with Manu P. Sobti), of "Persianate Civitas: Revised Readings on Networked Urbanities & Suburban Hinterlands in Erich Schmidt’s Flights over Ancient Cities of Iran” in Mohammad Gharipour (ed.) Revisiting the Historiography of Persianate Architecture (Routledge, forthcoming Fall 2015). A sample of Sahar’s recent and ongoing work includes the examination of Shi’a rituals as makers of temporal sites of power and resistance in the Iranian city, staging nationalist and modernist propaganda in urban public spaces of Tehran, and the transformation of maydan in early modern Persian cities.  

Sahar has presented her research at various national and international conferences, including the Middle Eastern Studies association conference (MESA), the Iranian studies conference (ISIS), the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Society. In recognition for her work, she has received the Golda Meir Library Award (2014), the Society of Architectural Historians’ SAHARA Fellowship (2013), the ARCC King Research Award (2011-12), and the Bob Greenstreet Honorary Scholarship (2012).

Kate Malaia

Kateryna Malaia is a PhD student in the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures (blc) interdisciplinary program at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, UWM. She holds B. Arch (2009) and M. Arch (2011) degrees from the National Academy of Arts and Architecture at Kiev (Ukraine). Kateryna’s research interests include the examination of social, spatial and aesthetic transformations of urban environments following the collapse of the Soviet Union. She is also interested in following the genesis and development of wall and surface mosaics across Soviet space (including the Russian Federation and the ex-Soviet Stans). Over the past three years, she has presented at several conferences, including most recently the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) 67th Annual Conference at Austin. Based on her presentation at the SAH convention, Kateryna is currently preparing a paper titled “A Building in Siege: The Case Study of Moscow Congregational Mosque’ towards publication in the International Journal of Islamic Architecture. Kateryna also teaches undergraduate design studio at SARUP, and is engaged in developing in collaboratively developing a Global Architectural History curriculum directed towards undergraduate and graduate students.

Nader Sayadi

Nader Sayadi is a PhD student in the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures (blc) program at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, UWM. Nader completed his Masters in Historic Preservation at Tehran University and his undergraduate studies in Architecture at the Tehran University of Art. He has worked full-time as an architectural historian and conservation architect in two firms at Tehran for more than two years. He is a member of Iran/ICOMOS, the Historians of Islamic Art Association (HIAA), the International Society of Iranian Studies (ISIS), and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). Nader has received SARUP’s Architecture General Scholarship, the Kogakuin University Travel Grant, the Fondazione Romualdo Del Bianco Scholarship, the Historians of Islamic Art Association Travel Grant, among several awards. He has presented papers at the Center for Culture and Society International Conference of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, the 7th European Conference of Iranian Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Poland), and at the Department of Architectural Design lectures at the Kogakuin University in Tokyo. He has also been admitted to present papers at the 32nd Deutscher Orientalistentag, Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft in Münster (Germany), and at the 9th International Society of Iranian Studies Biennial conference at Istanbul. His article in the Encyclopedia of Iran Historic Buildings Annotated Bibliography (in Farsi) shall be published by the Iranian Academy of Arts at Tehran. Besides his research and professional experiences, Nader has taught as an instructor and teaching assistant in various architecture undergraduate courses. Nader's current main research interest is the bilateral relationship between socio-geographical goods production networks and its interconnected craft landscapes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Middle East.

Leila Saboori

Leila Saboori is a PhD Student in the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures (blc) program at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at UWM. She received her Master’s Degree in Urban Studies in 2013 from UWM and holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Architecture degree from the Islamic Azad University of Shiraz (Iran). Leila worked as an architect and design consultant for three years in Iran before entering the Master’s program at the UWM in 2011. She is interested in the history of Middle Eastern Cities and the way contemporary built environments have honored past values, tradition, and design principals. She also examines the impact of urban design practices such as Neo-traditionalism and New Urbanism on the physical and social structures of cities. At SARUP, Leila has been working as a Teaching Assistant for the Survey of Structural Analysis and Design courses since fall 2013.

Contributing Scholars at other Institutions

Attilio Petruccioli is a Chairman and Professor of Landscape Architecture in the Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy. Before he became involved in an ambitious project of transforming a small architecture school of the Polytechnic University into one of the main research centers of traditional urban environments, he also served as the Aga Khan Professor and Director of Architecture for Islamic Societies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Aga Khan Program at MIT and Harvard University). He is the author of 12 books and over 200 articles covering the fields of Architecture, Urbanism, Islamic Urban History and Typological Studies. He is currently visiting Msheireb Property Chair at Qatar University, Doha.

T. S. McMillin is a Professor of English in the Environmental Studies program at Oberlin College, Ohio. Dr. McMillin is the author of numerous articles and two books, including the newly published The Meaning of Rivers: Flow & Reflection in American Literature (2011). His ongoing project is centered on the meaning and interpretations of the Los Angeles River.

Mohammad Gharipour is Associate Professor at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Morgan State University. He is the author of the book Persian Gardens and Pavilions: Reflections in Poetry, Arts and History (2013), editor and co-editor of other publications in the field of Islamic Urbanism and Design. Dr. Gharipour is also the director and founding editor of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture.

Husniddin Mamadaliev is Research Fellow in medieval Central Asian Studies at the Institute of History of Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan (Tashkent). He has participated in prominent site excavations, research projects and has completed multiple research articles in important journals. His work focuses on urban and economic processes in early-medieval Central Asia.

Pankaj Rishi Kumar is an independent documentary film producer and director based in Mumbai (India). He started with editing documentaries and TV serials, including Sekhar Kapur's Bandit Queen and proceeded to making his own first film Kumar Talkies. Subsequently, Pankaj has become a one-man crew producing, directing, shooting and editing his own films such as Pather Chujaeri, The Vote, Gharat, 3 Men and a Bulb, Punches and Ponytails, and Seeds of Dissent. His films have been screened at festivals all over the world. Pankaj has won grants from Hubert Bals, IFA, Jan Vrijman, Gotoberg, Banff, Majlis and Sarai and was also awarded an Asia Society Fellowship at Harvard Asia Center (2003).

Lajwanti Waghray is a director and producer at Red Crane Productions, a Milwaukee-based, documentary film production center that strives to make meaningful films that celebrate the artistic nature of the medium and address important social issues, serving as a catalyst for discussion. Waghray is a producer of Well-Founded Film movie and a producer and director of Sleepovers documentary.

Sangeeta Bagga-Mehta is an architect and urban designer with a special interest in the conservation of modern heritage ensembles. An alumina of the Chandigarh College of Architecture-Chandigarh (CCA), and the School of Planning and Architecture-New Delhi, she received her PhD in Architecture from Punjab University-Chandigarh. She is currently Associate Professor at the CCA where she has conducted multiple collaborative student workshops with universities worldwide, including the Bezalel University of Art & Design (Israel), the Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the Technical University at Delft (Netherlands). Her work and these collaborations are centered on the examination of urban landscapes, environmental design and social issues within Chandigarh. Her documentations of the rapid changes in Chandigarh’s urbanity have been presented at international conferences both within India and globally. In recent years, she has worked with the Chandigarh Administration’s Department of Tourism towards developing Tourism Promotion Infrastructure, Facilitation and Awareness Building projects vis a vis modern heritage ensembles in the city plan. She is also member of the Chandigarh Administration’s Heritage Committee, a member of the INTACH, and ICOMOS - INDIA. Prof. Bagga-Mehta is consultant to the Official Dossier preparation of the Trans-national Serial Nomination of the Architectural Works of Le Corbusier to UNESCO proposing the buildings of Chandigarh’s Capitol Complex for inscription.

Information:

Buildings/Landscapes/Cultures (blc) Program at SARUP-UWM

2131 E. Hartford Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53211. USA

For information on Research, Collaboration and PhD. Admissions - contact Manu P. Sobti at email:sobti@uwm.edu

All images, videos and animations on this website are copyrighted and used with permission from Manu P. Sobti, Sahar Hosseini, Kate Malaia, Nader Sayadi & Benjamin Brian Schaefer.