PhD, History of Art & Architecture
Lara Ayad is a PhD Candidate in the History of Art and Architecture and a Center for Humanities Dissertation Fellow at Boston University. She is currently writing her dissertation on the art collection of the Fuad I Agricultural Museum in Cairo. Lara’s research project is concerned with artistic depictions of peasants made by Egyptian artists and is one of the first critical analyses of gender representation and its intersection with race and national identity in early 20th century Egyptian art. One of Lara’s major research goals is to understand developments in modern Egyptian art within the context of African modernisms. Recently, Lara has taught courses in African art at Boston College and presented a lecture for the Walter Rodney Lecture Series at BU’s African Studies Center. She has won a number of grants and fellowships throughout her graduate studies, including a travel grant from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, a Long-term Graduate Research Abroad Fellowship to fund her doctoral fieldwork in Egypt, as well as Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships for her Arabic language studies at BU.
Dissertation Title:
“Picturesque Peasants: Painting Egyptian Identity at the Fuad I Agricultural Museum in Cairo″