How January Term is Redefining Education
Each January Term, NYUAD students choose hands-on classes in cities from Al Ain to Buenos Aires, challenging their perceptions of the past and enriching their visions of the future.
Each January Term, NYUAD students choose hands-on classes in cities from Al Ain to Buenos Aires, challenging their perceptions of the past and enriching their visions of the future.
Shamoon Zamir is working on many fronts to develop Akkasah: Center for Photography at NYU Abu Dhabi, a research archive that is gathering vernacular and documentary images dating back to the 19th century from around the Middle East and North Africa.
The history of photography has until very recently focused on the European and American traditions, says Shamoon Zamir. But that's changing rapidly now, and a major conference at NYU Abu Dhabi in March will contribute to that change.
Shamoon Zamir's new book, The Gift of the Face: Portraiture and Time in Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian, offers a reconsideration of the most influential photographic record of the Native Americans of the United States. Curtis dedicated himself to the project for 25 years, during which time he took more than 40,000 photographs.
The first annual NYU Abu Dhabi Research Conference showcased the diversity of academic work happening at the University by bringing together over 110 students and faculty from the Abu Dhabi and New York campuses.
"In one sense, all of my work so far has been about forms of cross-cultural encounter," said Shamoon Zamir, NYU Abu Dhabi associate professor of Literature and Visual Studies. Indeed, for the past 30 or so years, this has been his primary academic focus.
NYU Abu Dhabi faculty and researchers are frequently featured in local and international media.
23 photos from the Arab world that were almost lost forever
NYU Abu Dhabi’s Akkasah is using its 33,000 archived photographs to help preserve the Arab world’s cultural memory – and it has digitised more than 10,000 images so that they will live on
The National | March 19, 2020