Professor Emerita of the Department of the History of Art; Curator in the Near East Section of the Penn Museum
Year appointed: 1987; Served until 2019
Renata Holod is Curator in the Near East Section at the Penn Museum, the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor Emerita in the Humanities, and Emerita Senior Fellow of the Kolb Society. She is currently working on the Recovering Rayy Project, overseeing the preparation, scientific testing, and publication of the materials excavated at Rayy, a site south of present-day Tehran and initially investigated in the late 1930s by a joint expedition led by Dr. Erich F. Schmidt funded in part by the Penn Museum. She is preparing the publication of Recovering Rayy: Erich Schmidt’s Excavations at Rayy, Iran, and their contribution to the Study of the Material Culture of Medieval Iran as well as a volume on the finds from Rayy, The Material and Visual Culture of Rayy. She also continues her lengthy service on numerous editorial boards and advisory committees including Arkheolohiia, Ars Asiatiques, Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion, at Yale University, Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 1: The Near and Middle East, International Journal of Islamic Architecture, and Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World.
In 1987 Renata Holod was elected as one of the original Senior Fellows to the society, serving until 2019. Throughout her tenure at Penn, she has helped supervise 52 dissertations including the work of twelve Kolb Junior Fellows: Salah Hassan (1988), Michael Frachetti (2004), Ömür Harmanşah (2005), Susanna McFadden (2008), Günder Varinlioğlu (2008), Julia Perratorre (2012), Jordan Pickett (2015), Jamie Sanecki (2016), Cynthia Robinson (1995), Stephennie Mulder (2008), Tarek Kahlaoui (2008), and Leslee Michelsen (2011). The dissertations of the later four were directed by Professor Holod.
Renata Holod received an Honours B.A. in Islamic Studies from the University of Toronto, her M.A. in the History of Art from the University of Michigan, and her Ph.D. in Fine Arts from Harvard University. She has conducted archaeological and architectural fieldwork in Syria, Iran, Morocco, Central Asia, and Turkey, and completed an archaeological/ethno-historical survey on the island of Jerba, Tunisia. A recent project was a collaborative study of the thirteenth century grave goods of a Qipchaq kurgan in the Black Sea steppe. She co-curated the Penn Museum September 2010 – June 2011 exhibition “Archaeologists and Travelers in Ottoman Lands” and “Osman Hamdi Bey and the Americans,” Oct. 2011 – Jan. 2012 at the Pera Museum, Istanbul. She was instrumental in the Middle East Galleries redesign at the Penn Museum, which opened in April of 2018.
Renata Holod has served as Convenor, Steering Committee Member, and Master Jury Chair of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. She has also served as architectural consultant to Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), Arthur Ericson Architects, and Venturi Scott-Brown Architects, Mitchell/Giurgola Associates, H2L2, Michael Graves & Associates, and the Center for Architecture in New York City. She is a founding member of the Committee on Visual Studies at Penn. She was Clark Professor at Williams College and the Clark Institute in 2002. The Islamic Environmental Research Centre honored her with an Award for outstanding work in Islamic Architectural Studies in 2004. In 2010 she received the Provost’s Award for Distinguished Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring and was named College of Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities. In 2014, the festschrift Envisioning Islamic Art and Architecture: Essays in Honor of Renata Holod was published in her honor.
She has co-authored and edited several books including: City in the Desert: An Account of the Archaeological Expedition to Qasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi, Syria (1978); Architecture and Community: Building in the Islamic World Today (1983); Modern Turkish Architecture (1984); The Mosque and the Modern World (1997); The City in the Islamic World (2008); An Island through Time: Jerba Studies (2009). She is the author and co-author of numerous articles detailing her research, such as the 2012 “Imported and Native Remedies for a Wounded ‘Prince’: Grave Goods from the Chungul Kurgan in the Black Sea Steppe of the Thirteenth Century,” Medieval Encounters 18(4–5): 339–381; and “Event and Memory: The Freer Gallery’s Siege Scene Plate,” Ars Orientalis 42: 194–219; in 2017 “Approaching the Mosque: Birth and Evolution” in The World of the Mosque: Magnificent Designs, 14–21; and “Jerba in the 3rd/9th century CE: Under Aghlabi Control?” in The Aghlabids & their Neighbors: Art & Material Culture in Ninth-Century North Africa, 451–469; in 2018 “Locus of Civilization” in Penn Museum’s Expedition Magazine 60.1: 84–91; and recently “What’s in a Name” in Sheila R. Canby et al., eds., The Seljuks (2020), 215–227.