Gülru Necipoğlu (born 3 April 1956 in Istanbul) is ülruNecipoğa Turkish American professor of Islamic Art/Architecture. She has been the Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University since 1993, where she started teaching as Assistant Professor in 1987. She received her Harvard Ph.D. in the Department of History of Art and Architecture (1986), her BA in Art History at Wesleyan (Summa Cum Laude, 1979), her high school degree in Robert College, Istanbul (1975). She is married to the Ottoman historian and Harvard University professor Cemal Kafadar. Her sister is the historian Nevra Necipoğlu.
Necipoğlu is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, and Centro Internazionale di Studi di Archittettura Andrea Palladio in Vicenza. She was an invited faculty scholar at Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz-Max-Planck-Institut (2013, 2014), and the Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge (2013). Her prize-winning books are: The Arts of Ornamental Geometry (2017); The Age of Sinan (2005), The Topkapı Scroll (1996). Her books and numerous essays have appeared in English, Turkish, French, Spanish, Persian, and Arabic.
Necipoğlu specializes in premodern Islamic arts/architecture, especially the Mediterranean and Eastern Islamic lands. Her publications address aesthetic cosmopolitanism, transregional connectivity between early modern empires (Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal), artistic exchanges with Byzantium and Renaissance Europe, plans, and drawings in pre-modern architectural practice, aesthetics of abstraction, and geometric ornament. Her critical interests encompass methodological and historiographical issues in modern constructions of the field of Islamic art and Orientalism.
Career and works
Necipoğlu graduated from the Robert College of Istanbul in 1975. She received a degree in art history with a concentration on Late Medieval and Renaissance periods from Wesleyan University in 1979. She attended the Williams College junior-year exchange program in 1978. In 1982, she received a master's degree in Islamic art and architecture from Harvard University, where she obtained her Ph.D. in 1986 with a dissertation titled, The Formation of an Ottoman Imperial Tradition: The Topkapı Palace in the 15th and 16th Centuries, under the supervision of Oleg Grabar. Her Ph.D. dissertation was the winner of the King Fahd Grand Prize for Excellence of Research in Islamic Architecture (1986). Based on her research project as Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at Columbia University (1986–87), she published “The Life of an Imperial Monument: Hagia Sophia after Byzantium,” in Hagia Sophia: From the Age of Justinian to the Present, ed. Robert Mark and Ahmet Çakmak (1992). An abridged Turkish translation of this now timely study appeared in Toplumsal Tarih 254 (2015).
One of Necipoğlu’s earliest articles, “Plans and Models in 15th and 16th-Century Ottoman Architectural Practice” won the Society of Architectural Historians Best Article by a Young Author prize (1986). Her article, “Süleyman the Magnificent and the Representation of Power in the Context of Ottoman-Hapsburg-Papal Rivalry” was awarded the Best Article Published in any Discipline prize by the Turkish Studies Association (1991).