Samer Akkach

Samer Akkach is Professor of architectural history and theory and Founding Director of the Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture (CAMEA) at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He was born in Damascus, Syria, where he grew up and completed his undergraduate education in architecture at the University of Damascus before moving to Australia to complete his postgraduate studies at the University of NSW and University of Sydney. Samer is a leading researcher whose interdisciplinary scope spans several fields, including history and theory of architecture and landscape, early modern Arab-Islamic intellectual and socio-urban histories, history of Islamic science, and Islamic cosmology, philosophy, and mysticism. He has received several prestigious grants and awards for his teaching and research, including several Discovery grants from the Australian Research Council (ARC), the ARC’s Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award (DORA), and the Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies’ prize for distinguished research in humanities and social sciences.