Lara Tohme is an Assistant Professor of Art, the Knafel Assistant Professor of Humanities and co-Director of the Architecture Program. Professor Tohme’s primary fields of research include cross-cultural interaction in the medieval world from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries and medieval Islamic architecture. She recently published articles on the role of monasteries and country estates in eighth-century Syria in Negotiating Secular and Sacred in Medieval Art: Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, eds. Alicia Walker and Amanda Luyster (Ashgate, 2008), and on early Islamic bathhouses in Bathing Culture in Anatolian Civilizations: Architecture, History and Imagination, ed. Nina C. Ergin (Peeters Publishers, forthcoming). She co-authored The Umayyads: The Rise of Islamic Art (Art Books International, 2001), and her work has also been published in Al-Masaq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean and The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages. She is currently at work on a book length study on Norman Architecture in Sicily and the way in which the Normans adopted and adapted Byzantine and Islamic motifs to formulate a new architectural language.

At Wellesley College, Professor Tohme teaches a variety of courses on the history of Islamic, western medieval and Byzantine art. She received a B.A. in Art History from the University of Washington, an M.A. in Art History from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. in the History of Architecture: Theory and Criticism from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Professor Tohme has received several fellowships, including the Aga Khan Award for Architectural Studies at MIT and the Samuel H. Kress Fellowship at the American Center for Oriental Research in Amman, Jordan.

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Profile last updated: 8/09