Nasser Rabbat is the Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Architecture at MIT where he has been teaching since 1991. His interests include Islamic art and architecture, medieval urban history and historiography, and post-colonial criticism. His research focuses on the overlapping intercultural spaces where peoples have always met and exchanged ideas, views, beliefs, and practices, and, in the process, created art and architecture. He teaches surveys of the architecture of the Islamic world and lecture courses with emphasis on specific cities or particular themes. His graduate seminars include topics that range from Islamic urbanism, and cultural signification in architecture, to Orientalism and historiography of Islamic architecture. Many of his courses are available on the web: 4.614, which covers the history of religious architecture, 4.615 on the history of Cairo, 4.612, which deals with a wide array of environmentally sensible examples from Islamic architectural history, and 4.611 on civic Islamic architecture.

Professor Rabbat earned his BArch from the University of Damascus, MArch II from UCLA, and PhD from MIT. His dissertation "The Citadel of Cairo, 1176-1341: Reconstructing Architecture from Texts" won the 1991 Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award from the Middle East Study Association. A book based on the dissertation, The Citadel of Cairo: A New Interpretation of Royal Mamluk Architecture, was published in 1995. Professor Rabbat has a book of essays on architecture in Arabic titled Thaqafat al Bina’ wa Bina’ al-Thaqafa (The Culture of Building and Building Culture) (Beirut: Riad Alrayyes Publisher, 2002). He is a co-author of Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition, ed. D. Reynolds (University of California Press, 2001) and co-editor with Nezar AlSayyad and Irene Beirman of Making Cairo Medieval (Lexington Press, 2005).

He is currently putting the finishing touches on a study on the fifteenth-century Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi, which will be published by Brill, and a collection of essays, Architecture As Social History: Building, Culture, and Politics in Mamluk Egypt and Syria, currently under consideration by I.B. Tauris. He is also editing a book of essays on the courtyard house entitled, The Courtyard House: Between Cultural Expression and Universal Application, to be published by Ashgate in 2007, and working on two other books: L'art Islamique à la recherche d'une méthode historique, a collection of essays which he originally delivered as lectures at the Institut du monde arabe (IMA) in Paris, and the proceedings of an international conference, "Islamic Cities in the Classical Age," which he organized at MIT in May 2005.

Before joining the faculty in 1991, Rabbat worked as a designer in Los Angeles and in Damascus. Among his honors are The Chaire de l’Institut du Monde Arabe (2003), The American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) Fellowship (1999-00 and 1988-89); The J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship (1993-94) in the History of Art and Humanities; and a visitorship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton (1996-97). Beside publishing articles in specialized scholarly journals and edited collections in English, French, and Arabic, professor Rabbat regularly contributes to a number of Arabic newspapers and journals, such as Wughat Nazar, Akhbar al-Adab, Jaridat al-Funun, al-Hayat and al-Adaab, on art, architectural, and critical and cultural issues. He serves on the boards of various organizations concerned with Islamic cultures, lectures extensively in the US and abroad, and maintains several websites focused on Islamic Architecture.