Saleem Al-Bahloly
Senior Humanities Research Fellow
Education: AB, University of Chicago; PhD, University of California, Berkeley
Research Areas: history of art in the Middle East during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the modern afterlife of the Sufi tradition; critical theory
About Saleem
Dr. Saleem Al-Bahloly is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut (AUB), where he researches and teaches the history of modern art in the Middle East. He is particularly interested in how the artwork can renew concepts formed by religious traditions, and what kind of critique those concepts might enable in the modern world. He is completing a book manuscript about how a concept of truth that formed in the tenth century reappeared in the work of the artists Dia al-Azzawi and Shakir Hassan Al Saʿid during the 1960s and 1970s.
Publications
Books
Al-Bahloly, Saleem. al-Itijāh naḥwa al-muḥīṭ: kitābāt Hanāʾ Mālallah, 1989-2002. Beirut: AUB Press (forthcoming 2025).
Journals
Al-Bahloly, Saleem. “Seeing the Point for the Line: Shakir Hassan Al Saʿid’s Contemplative Concept of the Artwork.” Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World 15, no. 1-2 (2021): 133-47.
Al-Bahloly, Saleem. “The Migration of a Form: An Ancient Islamic Concept Resurfaces in the Modern Artwork.” Critical Inquiry 47, no. 1 (2020): 76-114.
Al-Bahloly, Saleem. “History Regained: a Modern Artist in Baghdad Encounters a Lost Tradition of Painting.” Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Cultures of the Islamic World 35 (2018): 229-272.