Join us for this VCUarts Lecture Series event with Hamad bin Khalifa Endowed Chair for Islamic Art and Associate Professor Hala Auji, Ph.D.
This talk, “Facing Pages: Exploring Mass Portraiture in Arabic Print,” explores nineteenth-century mass portraiture in Beirut and Cairo, featured in Arabic books, periodicals and everyday materials. These images, circulating across private homes and storefronts, played a crucial role in shaping the public image of local Arabic-speaking scholars. Using posthumously printed portraits of Syrian intellectuals, Auji will illustrate how this imagery negotiated views on authorship, representation and vision. She will also discuss the study of these portraits, which were published alongside text and other engravings, and considerations of their mediums and formats while addressing the challenges posed by today’s methods and technologies.
Hala Auji, Associate Professor of Art History and Hamad bin Khalifa Endowed Chair for Islamic Art, teaches courses on modern/contemporary art, Islamic art and architecture, pedagogy, museum collections and exhibitions with a focus on Southwest Asia and North Africa. Her research explores a transcultural history of artistic modernity, museums and print culture in the eastern Mediterranean, examining intersections between art history, design, literature and Islamic and Middle East studies. She is the author of Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Brill, 2016), co-editor of The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment: Mass Culture and the Middle East (Bloomsbury, 2023) and editor of “Rupture and Response,” a special issue of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture (2023). Her work has been published in various journals, edited volumes, exhibition catalogs and online platforms.
This is a hybrid event. Please register in advance to attend virtually.