This presentation examines the relationship between palace building and poetry writing at Samarra, the capital of the Abbasid Empire in Iraq from 836 to 892 CE. Unusually, Samarra’s palaces became the subject of a number of poems written by the most talented court poets of the day. These architectural poems, consisting of twenty to forty lines written in the idiom of the classical Arabic ode, were lauded at the time of their composition as excellent examples of the poetic craft.

 This talk and open discussion is taken from Stewart's new study, The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2020). There she traces, from classical texts to twentieth-century monuments, the Western fascination with ruins and asks why, paradoxically, ruins and ruination have became central to our aesthetics, including the practices of painters, print-makers, poets, and architectural theorists.

Lecture to be followed by a panel discussion with Aga Khan Professors: From Harvard, Gülru Necipoğlu; and from MIT, Nasser Rabbat and James Wescoat.

No event has given “democracy” a worse name than the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 with the pretext of bringing democracy to Iraq. Since then, more controversies have obstructed Iraq’s right to heal from conflict.