Congratulations to Enass Khansa on accepting a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut

Posted in News Story

Enass Khansa has officially accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Arabic and Near-Eastern Languages at the American University of Beirut, starting August 2017. Enass will be teaching classical Arabic Literature, material culture and Islamic Studies at the graduate and undergraduate levels.
Enass is currently an Associate (2016-2017) in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University.

Enass earned a Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Georgetown University (2015), under the supervision of Professors Suzanne Stetkevych, Felicitas Opwis, and Cynthia Robinson. Entitled “The Necklace and the Rhetoric of Restoration,” the dissertation presents a monograph of The Neckalce, a twenty-five volume encyclopedic adab compilation, from 10th century Córdoba. In this project, Enass introduces readership, broadly conceived, as a lens to examine the conception of legitimacy in the interplay between artistic, political and intellectual histories of al-Andalus—and how this relates to the broader Islamic and Iberian contexts.

Last year (2015-2016), Enass was the recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from Harvard University’s Real Colegio Complutense (RCC), through which she joined the Santiago Cathedral Project (Spain), an innovative multidisciplinary conservation project of the Santiago Cathedral World Heritage Monument. Apprehended as the pilgrimage that shaped Europe—as Goethe once said, the Santiago Cathedral, for centuries, was linked exclusively to Europe, where influences have been traced along the Camino. Enass’ research redirects the traditional map southward, to al-Andalus, to incorporate Islamic culture as a realm intimately connected with the artistic, ritualistic, architectural and knowledge sharing features of the Santiago Shrine/Church/Cathedral.

For the current academic year 2016-2017, Enass has joined the Aga Khan Program at Harvard, where she proposes khabar in historiographical, exegetical and adab compilations be explored as primary sources in material cultural inquiries. This she follows in her own project as she reconstructs, from multiple literary and material cultural evidence, the image(s) the Umayyads inhabit—up to their present representations, in the scholarship and in popular imaginative cultures. She will present her research at the Aga Khan Lecture Series, in a talk entitled “Aesthetics and the Cenotaphicin Iberian Medieval Culture.”

Congratulations to Enass!