Urban Modernity in the Contemporary Gulf (ePub)

Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi is a columnist and researcher on social, political, and cultural affairs in the Arab Gulf states. Al-Qassemi is also founder of the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah, UAE. He was an MIT Media Lab Director's Fellow from 2014 to 2016, a practitioner-in-residence at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University in spring 2017 and a Yale Greenberg World Fellow in 2018. Al-Qassemi was a visiting instructor at the Council of Middle East Studies at Yale University, the Center of Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, the American University of Paris, the Islamic Civilization and Societies programme at Boston College and the School of Public Affairs at SciencesPo, Paris. In the Fall 2021 Al-Qassemi was appointed as Kuwait Foundation Visiting Scholar, Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School and Lecturer, School of Arts and Sciences, Brandeis University. Al-Qassemi, along with Todd Reisz, is co-editor of Building Sharjah (Birkhauser, 2021).

Roberto Fabbri is an architect, researcher, and associate professor at Zayed University, UAE. From 2016 to 2021 he taught at the University of Monterrey, Mexico, and previously at the University of Bologna, Italy, and the American University of Kuwait. As a consultant of the United Nations Development Programme, Roberto participated in the rehabilitation of Kuwait National Museum and completed the transformation of the American Missionary Hospital of Kuwait into cultural hub. He regularly participates in international conferences, recently at Yale, Cambridge, King's College London, and INHA-Paris, and has published extensively in academic journals, such as Domus; Faces, journal d'architecture; and International Journal of Islamic Architecture. He has published two books on the architectural works of Max Bill (Mondadori 2011, inFolio 2017) and co-authored the double-volume, Modern Architecture Kuwait 1949-89 (Niggli 2016, 2017).