Acclaimed Ottoman and North African architectural historian and curator Zeynep Çelik has won the UCLA Giorgio Levi Della Vida Award in Islamic Studies. A distinguished professor of Ottoman history and architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) and the federated department of history at NJIT and Rutgers-Newark, Çelik also teaches history at Columbia University.
“I consider the Giorgio Levi Della Vida Award the most important acknowledgment of scholarship in Middle Eastern Studies,” she remarks. “I am truly honored and humbled to receive the award. It is a great privilege to join the group of legendary scholars — the former awardees whose work I have admired for a long time,” she adds. As part of the award, she will organize a conference at the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies in May: “Perspectives on French Colonial and Late Ottoman Cultural History.”
Professor Çelik is the 22nd winner of award, which was created by the first director of the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, Gustav E. von Grunebaum (1909–1972), in honor of the Jewish Italian linguist and Middle East expert Giorgio Levi Della Vida (1886–1967). Della Vida was one of 12 Italian professors who refused to sign an oath of loyalty to Mussolini and spent the years of World War II teaching in the United States. After the war, he returned to Italy and resumed teaching at the University of Rome. As part of the award, a conference will be convened on her scholarly interests and contributions to the field at the Center for Near Eastern Studies later this spring.
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Zeynep Celik joined SAH in 2001 and became a Life Member in 2015. She has served as a Session Chair at the 2015 Annual Conference, and received an SAH Mellon Author Award in 2015.