Nancy Demerdash

Assistant Professor of Art History
Email: [email protected]
Phone: (517) 629-0508
Office: 208-A Bobbitt Visual Arts Center

Dr. Nancy Demerdash specializes in modern and contemporary art and architecture of the Middle East and North Africa. At Albion, she teaches a wide range of courses in art history, art theory and global visual culture. Though much of her scholarship is rooted in the study of architecture and visual cultures of the Maghreb (North Africa) under French colonial rule in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, her other research projects have focused on popular arts of the so-called Arab Spring, the politics of migration and displacement in contemporary Franco-Maghrebi art, contemporary artistic practice and censorship in the Gulf states, and the politics and postcolonial afterlives of Maghrebi courtyard houses. Her current book project, based on her doctoral work, examines the architectural and spatial processes of reconstruction, decolonization, and nation-building in postwar Tunisia.

Courses

  • ARTH 116 Global Visual Cultures in Critical Perspective
  • ARTH 289 Introduction to African Arts
  • ARTH 289 Contemporary African Arts
  • ARTH 289 Islamic Visual Cultures
  • ARTH 317 How to Read a Work of Art: Theories and Methods for the Visual Arts

Education

  • Ph.D. Art & Archaeology, Princeton University, 2015
  • M.A. Art & Archaeology, Princeton University, 2012
  • S.M.Arch.S. (Master of Science in Architecture Studies), Architecture Studies, Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009
  • B.A. (with Honors and Distinction) Art History and Religious Studies (minor), University of Wisconsin-Madison

Book Chapters in Edited Volumes

Journal Articles

Book or Exhibition Reviews

Encyclopedia Entries