Dr Olga Bush is a scholar of Islamic art and architecture, whose research interests engage interdisciplinary methods and theoretical issues in a wide variety of topics ranging from the relationship of poetry to architecture in medieval Muslim aesthetics to nineteenth-century European and American Orientalism, to patronage of the arts in twentieth-century collecting practices.
Currently, a Visiting Associate Professor of Islamic art and architecture at Bard College, she has taught at SUNY-New Paltz and Vassar College, held fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence and published widely in such journals asMuqarnas, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Artibus Asiae, Gesta and the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, as well as in edited volumes, the Encyclopaedia of Islam and the new catalogue of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
She has co-edited a volume of essays titled Gazing Otherwise: Modalities of Seeing in and beyond the Lands of Islam (Brill, 2015). Dr. Bush’s book, Reframing the Alhambra: Architecture, Poetry, Textiles and Court Ceremonial (Edinburgh University Press, 2018),was a finalist for the 2019 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, which “honors an especially distinguished book in the history of art, published in the English language” (College Art Association).
