Iheb Guermazi

Fellow, Society of Fellows, SOF/Heyman, Columbia University (2023-)

Lecturer, Art History, Columbia University

Lecturer, Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University

Email: ig2497@columbia.edu

Iheb Guermazi is an architect and architectural historian. In 2022, he received a PhD in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was affiliated with the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. He also holds a Master's of Architecture from the University of Carthage in Tunisia and a Master's in the History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Washington where he was a Fulbright scholar. Iheb is interested in the intersection between art, architecture, and modern mystical and esoteric movements and his research centers alternative aesthetic hermeneutics emanating from non-western, non-positivist or anti-modern perspectives. His current book project "The Spiritual Turn: Modern Sufism and the Study of Islamic Art and Architecture," traces the intellectual history of a group of Muslim mystics, artists, and art theorists -writing in the late 19th and early-mid 20th century--who developed an anti-Western art theory with novel conceptions of tradition, beauty, authorship, and time. His work has received support from organizations like the MIT Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture and the Harvard University Center for European Studies. Iheb is also the co-founder of Atelier SCAR, a Tunis based design and architecture firm.