Biosketch

Dr. Farès el-Dahdah is the Mamdouha El-Sayed Bobst Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Art History at the American University of Beirut. He previously held professorships in art history and in architecture at Rice University where he also led its Humanities Research Center and was the recipient of grants from such philanthropic agencies as the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Getty Foundation. El-Dahdah received his undergraduate degrees in fine arts and in architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design and went on to pursue his graduate studies in urbanism and architectural theory at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design where his interests in bridging literary theory and architecture were a first manifestation of a lifelong commitment to interdisciplinarity. Along the trajectory of his career, el-Dahdah was the Cisneros Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, a visiting fellow at the Canadian Center for Architecture, and the recipient of the Arthur W. Wheelwright Fellowship. He has written extensively on Brazil’s modern architecture and has been involved in several projects with Casa de Lucio Costa and Fundação Oscar Niemeyer, two Brazilian cultural foundations on the boards of which he serves. In recent years, data science and digital art history have increasingly become central to his research and so has the creation of online geospatial platforms in the areas of cultural heritage, public health, social justice, disaster response, and climate change.