Michèle Lamprakos

Michele Lamprakos is Associate Professor at the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, University of Maryland-College Park. Trained as an architect and architectural/urban historian, she specializes in the early modern/modern Arab-Islamic world and critical heritage studies.  Her research focuses on two main themes: the lives and layers of buildings and sites; and contacts between faith-cultures in the Mediterranean. 

Lamprakos is author of Building a World Heritage City: Sanaa Yemen, the first book on urban heritage to be recognized by the Society of Architectural Historians’ Spiro Kostof Award (Honorable Mention, 2018).  Her second book project, Memento Mauri: the Afterlife of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, explores the changing fabric and meaning of the building as cathedral, national monument, and symbol of the Islamic past in Spain. Her research has been supported by the National Humanities Center, the Graham Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Delmas Foundation, and other organizations. She lectures widely and has organized two international symposia: “Conserving the City” (University of Pennsylvania, 2012, with Randall Mason); and “Heritage and the Arab Spring” (Freer Gallery of Art, 2014, with Nancy Um). She has served as Technical Reviewer for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture and as Desk Reviewer for UNESCO.