Walid Akef

Walid Akef is a PhD candidate in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University. He specializes in the architectural history of the pre-modern Mediterranean world, with a focus on North Africa, southern Italy, and Iberia. His research examines periurban and suburban landscapes of power, particularly the agricultural-recreational estates that proliferated in the western Islamic world before their re-emergence in Renaissance Italy. His broader interests include the use of art for political propaganda, cultural exchanges across the Mediterranean basin, and the historiography of Islamic art in English, Arabic, and Spanish intellectual circles.

Walid received his BA in Islamic Archaeology from Ain Shams University (Cairo, 2008), an MA in Art History from the University of Granada (2015), and an MA in Muslim Cultures from the Aga Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations in London (2019). He has taught as a teaching assistant at Ain Shams University and at Harvard University, and has published in Arabic, Spanish, and English in both regional and international journals. His research has been supported by the Aga Khan Program at Harvard, Villa I Tatti in Florence, the Center for African Studies and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, and Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC.