Nada Shabout

Coordinator of Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural Studies Initiative
Professor

Art History
Job Overview: 
Dr. Shabout's research and teaching addresses modern and contemporary visual practices and problems of representation from a global perspective, with emphasis on questions of methodology and in relation to the cultural politics of the Middle East. She teaches courses on Modern Arab art, global modern art, contemporary Middle Eastern art and Islamic art.
Contact Information
E-mail: 
Nada.Shabout@unt.edu
Areas of Expertise: 
Historiography of Arab art, Historiography of Iraqi art, Cultural destruction and preservation, Identity politics and art, global, Postcolonial and Feminist theory.
Bio: 

Nada Shabout is a Professor of Art History and the Coordinator of the Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural Studies Initiative (CAMCSI) at the University of North Texas. She is the founding president of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art from the Arab World, Iran and Turkey (AMCA). She was the Consulting Director of Research at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, and the editor-in-chief of the Mathaf Encyclopedia of Modern Art and the Arab World. In 2010, she led Mathaf’s curatorial team of the inaugural exhibition Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art, and curated one of the two accompanying opening exhibitions, Interventions: A dialogue between the Modern and the Contemporary. She has co-curated with Zainab Bahrani Modernism and Iraq at the Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, 2009, and curated the traveling exhibition, Dafatir: Contemporary Iraqi Book Art, 2005-2009.

She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary Arab and Iraqi art and the relationship of identity and visual representations in Iraq. She is the author of Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics, University of Florida Press, 2007; co-editor with Salwa Mikdadi of New Vision: Arab Art in the 21st Century, Thames & Hudson, 2009; and currently co-editing with Anneka Lenssen and Sarah Rogers the forthcoming volume Modern Art of the Arab World: Primary Documents, part of the International Program at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2017. 

She is the founder and project director of the Modern Art Iraq Archive (MAIA); a former member of the editorial committee of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) and of the International Editorial Advisory Board and subject editor for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism (REM). Her awards include: The American Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TAARII) fellow 2006, 2007; MIT visiting Assistant Professor, spring 2008, and Fulbright Senior Scholar Program, 2008 Lecture/Research fellowship to Jordan.