Keynote Speakers

Dr. Mirjam Brusius is a cultural historian, specializing in the history of collecting and visual culture across Modern Europe and the Middle East. She holds an MA in Art History (Berlin 2007) and a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science (Cambridge University 2011). Having won numerous awards for her projects she held posts at the University of Oxford, Harvard University, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and KHI Florenz. Her first books revisited the early history of photography, in particular the scholarly archive and network of the photographic pioneer W.H.F. Talbot. Her most recent book is entitled ‘Museum Storage and Meaning: Tales from the Crypt’ (coedited with Kavita Singh, Routledge). Her current research project examines the value of Middle Eastern archaeological objects during the transition period on their way to Europe when the finds seem to have "no status". Further research interests include the history of photography and heritage discourses in and about the Middle East.

Mina Marefat Ph.D., an urban designer, registered architect and architectural historian (PhD from MIT and Masters from Harvard), is the principal of Design Research and teaches at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Focusing on sustainable design, historic preservation and community revitalization, she has advised the Chief Architect of Historic Monuments of France, the Historic Preservation Office of Washington DC and the City Administrator of Newark, NJ. She previously served as Senior Architectural Historian at the Smithsonian Institution, as Education Director at the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Geneva, and as Research Associate at the National Gallery of Art.  Among her awards are the Fulbright, NEH, SSRC, AAUW and Rockefeller Fellowship at the Library of Congress. Mina has curated exhibitions including on Frank Lloyd Wright at the Guggenheim in NY and Bilbao and the traveling Eero Saarinen exhibition. She lectures internationally and has published extensively on modernism and its cross-cultural, global reach.

Dr. Aylin Orbasli is Reader in Architectural Regeneration at Oxford Brookes University. She is trained as an architect and specializes in the conservation of historic buildings and urban areas. She combines international practice with research and teaching. Her research specifically focuses on historic settlements informed by Islamic traditions of urban form and morphology and the ways in which they transition through the processes of urban development, and at times conflicting interests of tourism growth and community empowerment. Through consultancy practice she has prepared management plans for a number of World Heritage Sites and World Heritage Site nominations. Mainly operating in the Middle East and Turkey, her approach actively involves participatory approaches and wider stakeholder engagement practices in cultural heritage management. She is the author of two books, Tourists in Historic Towns (2000) and Architectural Conservation (2008) alongside numerous academic papers on the architecture of the Middle East.

Norman Hallermann is a research associate at the Chair of Modelling and Simulation of Structures and works since 2011 at Bauhaus University Weimar. In 2015 he won the YEP Award for the best young engineers contribution at IABSE Symposium in Geneva with his work "Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) - Survey and monitoring based on high-quality airborne photos". Norman Hallermann is member of the Research Group "Digital Engineering for Planning and Revitalisation Processes of Urban Areas".