Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis. Her research addresses issues of urban and architectural history in Islamic societies.  After studying at Beirut University College, she obtained a PhD in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles. Before joining the UC faculty she taught at Rice University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was the Aga Khan Career Development Professor in 2001-2005. She is the recipient of numerous grants, including the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship for Syria and Turkey, the Social Science Research Council fellowship, the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities summer grant, and the J. Paul Getty Post-doctoral Fellowship in the History of Art and the Humanities. Her book, The Image of an Ottoman City: Imperial Architecture and Urban Experience in Aleppo in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries(Leiden: Brill, 2004) received the Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians in 2006. It explores the relation between imperial ideology, urban practice and architectural form. She recently published the essay “Deviant Dervishes: Space, Gender and the Construction of Antinomian Piety in Ottoman Aleppo,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 37:4 (2005). She is currently working on the architecture of the coffeehouse as a site of sociability in early modern Mediterranean urbanism. Professor Watenpaugh is also interested in the critical theory of architectural preservation and the politics of heritage. She is currently writing a book, Ruins into Monuments, which concerns the cultural politics of the Middle East under French colonial rule in the 1920’s and 1930’s, in particular the process of "discovery," study, preservation and commodification of architectural forms from the past, and its relationship to modernity, colonialism, and nationalism.