My commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion and decolonizing work is shaped by my personal background and perspectives. I am a Filipino-born-cis-female-geeky-introverted-mixed/WOC/BAME-immigrant-mom-enthusiastic amateur musician from a working-class family, who spent formative years in Italy and the American South.
I’m committed to public education and to making accurate, inclusive knowledge about global art and history widely and freely accessible to all, in and out of the academy. With one exception, my doctoral institution MIT, all the schools and universities I have attended in my life are US public institutions.
A snapshot of my academic path
I earned my PhD at MIT in 2005 in the History, Theory & Criticism of Architecture and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. Before arriving in Edinburgh in 2018 I was Associate Professor of Art History with tenure at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I taught Islamic art history since 2006. Before that I held visiting lectureships at Boston Architectural College, Dartmouth College, and Brandeis University.
Before becoming interested in Islamic architectural history, I wanted to preserve historic buildings and urban fabric in the US. I completed my MA in Architectural History and Historic Preservation at the University of Virginia, where I enjoyed working with the architectural conservators on restoration projects at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. I started my academic journey as an English Lit major.
Books
My second book, A Bridge to the Sky: The Arts of Science in the Age of ‘Abbas Ibn Firnas, was published in 2024 by Oxford University Press. It examines early Islamic science and visual culture through the career of the 9th c. polymath ‘Abbas Ibn Firnas, remembered today as an early Islamic ‘scientist,’ and for his experiment in early gliding flight.
My first book, The Islamic Villa in Early Medieval Iberia (Ashgate, 2013; 1st paperback ed. Routledge, 2018 ) examined the centrality of the elite suburban villa (Arabic munya) to court culture, art, and society during the reign of the Cordoban Umayyad dynasty (r. 756 – 1031 CE) in present-day Spain. It was awarded the 2015 Eleanor Tufts Award from the American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies.
Video Games Industry Consultancy & Collaboration
I work with video games industry professionals who share my values and aims of bringing greater historical accuracy and authenticity to games and entertainment. Why? Because more people than ever before are being introduced to history through video games and other forms of screen-based entertainment. This is an outgrowth of my longstanding research using game engines for historical visualisation, which informed my first book and subsequent research on social functions of medieval Islamic villas.
My consultancy and collaboration on Assassin’s Creed Mirage and its in-game Codex educational feature, ‘The History of Baghdad’ (Ubisoft, 2023), has been widely featured in international media, and has been the focus of talks for industry audiences, notably at Game Developers Conference (GDC) San Francisco, invited talks at Edinburgh Futures Institute, University of Glasgow, SOAS, University of York, and University of Michigan, and podcast appearances on History Respawned and This is History with Dan Jones, among others.
The results of my consultancy and collaboration on the Assassin’s Creed Mirage Codex are now freely available to learners 12+ in the Discovery Tour Medieval Baghdad (Ubisoft, 2025) app.
My work with Ubisoft was recognised with a 2023 Best Impact from a Data-Led Project Award from the Edinburgh Centre for Data, Culture, & Society, a 2022 Barakat Trust Major Grant, a UKRI Economic & Social Science Research Council (ESRC) Impact Accelleration Main Grant, and a CRoSS ASPECT Innovation Fellowship.
Images: Ubisoft
My media appearances are here.
