For our third brownbag of the semester, Religious Studies welcomes Jennifer Pruitt, Religious Studies Affiliate from Art History and the Howard and Ellen Louise Schwartz Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture! Pruitt will present her work titled “Inheriting Islamic Art History: I.M. Pei’s Museum of Islamic Art, Doha” on Friday, November 7th from 12:15pm – 1:15pm. This event is open to all interested faculty, students, staff, and community members. Please share widely with those who may be interested.
Talk description: Rising from its own island in the Arabian Gulf, the monumental Museum of Islamic Art, designed by I. M. Pei (1917–2019) in 2008, stands without peers in the ever-developing skyline of Doha, Qatar. Its white cubist form exists as an isolated sculpture in the round, which can be appreciated equally from the towering, experimental skyscrapers of the city’s West Bay, the seven-kilometer seaside corniche, and the extended arm of the park that cradles it. Architecture and cultural projects have played a defining role in the rapid development of Qatar as a nation, but it is Pei’s design that first placed it on the global cultural map, changing the contours of Islamic art history and introducing a powerful new center for the collection and display of historical Islamic works. I consider the Museum of Islamic Art as an example of cultural sponsorship in the service of nation-building, illuminating the networks of global collecting, design, and display that brought it to fruition. By integrating a formal reading of the monument with official narratives and archival research, I argue that the concept and inauguration of the Museum of Islamic Art marshaled older, essentialist, Western-constructed narratives about Islamic art history to situate Qatar—a new nation that plays little role in the traditional narratives in the field—as the inheritor of these vast, earlier traditions.
Date: Friday, November 7, 2025
Time: 12:15 – 1:15pm
Location: Room 202/204 (2nd Floor Conference Room), Bradley Memorial Building
Street Address: 1225 Linden Drive, Madison, Wisconsin 53706
Download the event poster as a PDF.: Pruitt 11.7 Brownbag