Urban Modernity in the Contemporary Gulf

Roberto Fabbri is an architect, researcher, and professor at University of Monterrey, Mexico, where heteaches exhibition design and adaptive reuse of modern buildings. He previously taught at the University of Bologna, Italy, and the American University of Kuwait. As a consultant of the United Nations Development Programme, Roberto participated in the rehabilitation of Kuwait National Museum and completed the transformation of the American Missionary Hospital of Kuwait into cultural hub. He regularly participates in international conferences, recently at Yale, Cambridge, King's College London, and INHA-Paris, and published extensively in academic journals, such as Domus; Faces, journal d'architecture; and International Journal of Islamic Architecture. He published two books on the architectural works of Max Bill (2011, 2017) and co-authored the double-volume, Modern Architecture Kuwait 1949-89 (2015, 2017).Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi is a columnist and researcher on social, political, and cultural affairs in the Arab Gulf States. Al-Qassemi is also founder of the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah, UAE. He was an MIT Media Lab Director's Fellow from 2014 to 2016, a practitioner-in-residence at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University in spring 2017, and a Yale Greenberg World Fellow in 2018. Al-Qassemi was a visiting instructor at the Council of Middle East Studies at Yale University, the Center of Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, the Islamic Civilization and Societies program at Boston College, and the School of Public Affairs at SciencesPo, Paris. He, along with Todd Reisz, is co-editor of Building Sharjah (2021).