Alex Dika Seggerman
Alex Dika Seggerman is associate professor of Islamic art history. She specializes on the intersection of Islam and modernism in art history.
Her first book, Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt between the Islamic and the Contemporary (UNC Press, 2019), traces the arc of Egyptian modernism in art, arguing that artists confronted and visualized the transnational context of their circulation through a “constellational modernism.” She made over a hundred images of modern Egyptian artwork available on JSTOR as well as published an open-access companion essay and image collection in MAVCOR. She delivered lectures about her book around the world, including at William & Mary, Boston College, NYU, and in Beirut.
Her second book, Making Modernity In the Islamic Mediterranean (Indiana University Press, 2022), is a co-edited volume that repositions major changes in nineteenth century Islamic art as the result of transformative political, technological, and market shifts. The volume includes a chapter by Dr. Seggerman that analyzes the impact of reproducible image technologies, from engraving to photography, on Cairo’s Muhammad Ali Mosque (1830-48).
Dr. Seggerman’s next book project, Art Histories of American Islam, has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Museum for Asian Art. The project examines the long history of Islam and art in America, from the 17th century until today. This research includes portraits of enslaved Muslims, material culture of early Ottoman Arab immigrants in the American midwest, and the work of contemporary artists Ghada Amer, Shirin Neshat, and Shahzia Sikander at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Recently, Dr. Seggerman published an article examining the photographic archives of Islamic architectural historian K.A.C. Creswell in the International Journal of Islamic Architecture (2024). She also contributed a chapter to Historical Narratives of Global Modern Art (2023) and has an upcoming chapter in Decolonizing Islamic Art in Africa (2024).
Dr. Seggerman serves as assistant editor for the International Journal of Islamic Architecture and will be the in-house editor for an upcoming special issue on gender and architecture in the Islamic world. At Rutgers, Dr. Seggerman co-chairs the Islam, the Humanities and the Human working group. She will co-curate an exhibit, Powers of the Unseen, that will open at Express Newark in 2025.
Courses Taught
- Global Modern Art, 21:082:215
- Introduction to Islamic Art and Visual Culture, 21:082:289
- Introduction to Islamic Architecture, 21:082:290
- Representing Gender in the Modern Middle East, 21:082:291
- Imagining the Orient: 19th Century Art of the Mediterranean, 21:082:306
- Middle Eastern Cinema: Cairo and Tehran on Film, 21:082:305
- Why Museums Matter: The Newark Museum of Art, 21:082:375
Research Initiatives
Dr. Seggerman’s work has been supported by the Smithsonian, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, American Research Center in Egypt, the Millard Meiss Publication Fund, the Barakat Foundation, the Sams Fund at Smith College, and the Grabar Postdoctoral Grant from the Historians of Islamic Art Association.
Education
Yale University, Ph.D. History of Art, 2014
Columbia University, B.A. Art History, 2005
Publications
Books
Alex Dika Seggerman and Margaret Graves, “Introduction,” Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean, Indiana University Press, 2022.
Alex Dika Seggerman “Alabaster and Albumen: The Muhammad Ali Mosque and the Making of a Modern Icon,” Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean, Indiana University Press, 2022.
Alex Dika Seggerman, “Modern and Contemporary Egyptian Art,” Oxford Bibliographies (2022).
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