Theodore Van Loan
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History
Theodore Van Loan is a historian of the art and architecture of the Islamic world, specializing in the cultural, historical, and conceptual origins of Islamic art. They received their doctorate in the history of art at the University of Pennsylvania and have held teaching positions at the University of Pennsylvania, Smith College, and Washington and Lee University. Van Loan is currently working on their first book project, Emerging Visions: The Genesis of Islamic Art, which examines the role of the gaze as it was conceptualized within building, artmaking practices, and texts of the emerging Islamic world in the 7th and 8th Centuries CE. Van Loan’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships Program of the U.S. Department of Education, and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers.
Recent Courses Taught
A World of Art
Misfit Objects in the Islamic World
Postcolonial Theory and Islamic Art
Distinctions
- National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Scholar, 2012
Selected Publications
- “Textiles by Other Means: Seeing and Conceptualizing Textile Representations in Early Islamic Architecture,” in Textile in Architecture. From the Middle Ages to Modernism, eds. Didem Ekici, Patricia Blessing, and Basile Baudez. Routledge, 2023.
- “Multiple Temporalities and the Scene of Time: A Pair of Wooden Doors at the Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo,” in Reading Objects in the Contact Zone, eds. Eva-Maria Troelenberg, Anna Sophia Messner, and Kerstin Schankweiler. Heidelberg Studies on Transculturality, 2021. (peer reviewed series)
- “Signifying Visions in Early Islam: From J_hiliyya Idols to the Dome of the Rock and the Great Mosque of Damascus,” Beiträge zur Islamischen Kunst und Archäologie 6, 2020.
- “The Rome Mosque and Islamic Center: A Case Study of Diasporic Architecture in the Globalized Mediterranean,” (with Eva-Maria Troelenberg) International Journal of Islamic Architecture 8.2 (June 2019) (peer reviewed) (Also published in Farhan Karim and Patricia Blessing, eds. The Making of Modern Muslim Selves Through Architecture (Bristol: Intellect, December 2023)
- Review of “The Umayyads: History, Art and Culture in the First Century of Islam.? University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh UK. June 24-25, 2011 in caa.reviews [http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/1811]
Professional Affiliations
- College Art Association
- Historians of Islamic Art Association
Appointed to the Faculty
2025Educational Background
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
B.A., Cornell University
