The Center for Near Eastern Studies (CNES) at UCLA is pleased to announce that the 2019 Giorgio Levi Della Vida medal for excellence in Islamic studies will be awarded to Zeynep Çelik, distinguished professor of Ottoman history and architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and the Federated Department of History at the NJIT and Rutgers-Newark.

The Giorgio Levi Della Vida Award is given to outstanding scholars whose work has significantly and lastingly advanced the study of Islamic civilization. The scholar is selected by a committee appointed by the Chancellor of the university meeting under the chairmanship of the Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies.

The award carries with it a bronze medal, together with the obligation to present a formal lecture as part of a conference held on campus. The recipient of the award chooses the theme of the conference and selects the other participants. “Perspectives on French Colonial and Late Ottoman Cultural History” will take place May 30–31, 2019, in Kaplan Hall on the UCLA campus.  The conference proceedings will be published as a volume in the Giorgio Levi Della Vida Series in Islamic Studies.

Read full announcement and profile of Dr. Celik here

Dr. Celik has been an SAH member since 1982, served as JSAH Editor 2000-2003, and won the Spiro Kostof Book award in 2010. She also served as a member of the Hitchcock Book and Johnson Exhibition Catalogue Award Committees, and was a session chair at the SAH Annual Conference in 2014 in Austin, TX.