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Nancy Um,
Assistant Professor of Art History;
Ph.D. University of California,
Los Angeles.
Publications
Theses and
Dissertations
Supervised
Courses Taught
E-mail: nancyum@binghamton.edu
Office: Fine Arts 307
Phone: (607) 777-5864
Office Hours: tba
Specialization: Visual culture, the built environment, urbanism and commercial exchange around the early modern Indian Ocean.
Nancy Um received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Islamic Art and Architectural History from UCLA. She joined the art history faculty at Binghamton University as an assistant professor in 2001.
While teaching broadly in the archaeology, arts, architecture and urbanism of the Middle East and South Asia, her research examines the visual culture and built environments of trading communities around the Indian Ocean rim in the early modern period. Her forthcoming monograph explores the question of how maritime trade saturated the visual and built world of 17th and 18th C Yemen, with a focus on the Red Sea port city of Mocha, which is known internationally for its trade in coffee. In it, she examines the nature of Arab domestic and commercial architecture, critical issues in port city urbanism, and the politics of difference and spatial practice within city space. Her current work turns to the grammar of exchange in cross-cultural gift giving between the Qasimis of Yemen, the Safavids of Persia, the Mughals of India and European merchants in the 17th and 18th centuries.
She has conducted field and archival research in Turkey, Yemen, the Netherlands and England. She is the recipient of a number of research fellowships, including those from the Fulbright program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Getty Foundation. She also publishes on aspects of contemporary art and migration, particularly Asian and Asian American art.
