Current Research
In the course of my previous projects I have been dealing the new political, social, economic, and urban conditions that have arisen as a result of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. My dissertation entitled “Our Mosques Are Us: Rewriting National History of Bosnia-Herzegovina through Religious Architecture” explores the various ways in which different layers of history have come to define the architecture of contemporary mosques. Seeking to understand how cultural memory is spatially erased and reinvented, I will look at the mosque’s recurring ornamental and structural grammar, as well as its evolving meanings over time. In so doing, I will provide an extended historical perspective of the region’s mosque architecture since the fifteenth century, when Islam was first brought to the Balkans with the Ottoman conquest. The temporal focus of my research trajectory will be the post-socialist period, within which I will concentrate on select case studies representative of the ongoing identity-formation processes. While mosque architecture has been functioning as a carrier of different forms of identity throughout history, I will inquire whether the mosque is now increasingly becoming the very place where the incipient Bosniak nation is coming into being.
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Azra Akšamija, Current Research, 2009
Places: Different cities and villages in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Dissertation Committee: Nasser Rabbat (Advisor), HTC/MIT. Caroline Jones, HTC/MIT. András J. Riedlmayer, Harvard University.