Sarah Sabban

Sarah Sabban specializes in Arab and Middle Eastern history with a focus on intellectual history and material culture. She recently completed her PhD at the History and Archaeology Department at the American University of Beirut (AUB) in Lebanon. Her dissertation titled “al-Ṣināʿa in late Ottoman Beirut: A historical study of an Arabic concept” traces the emergence of al-ṣināʿa from the classical Arabic-Islamic corpus of knowledge into a modern field of inquiry.

Previously trained in anthropology (MA, AUB) and Islamic art history (MSt, University of Oxford), her research has focused on arts and crafts from the Islamic world and explored different categories used to describe, assess, and relate to them in a variety of contexts. These included the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, which Sabban compared in an ethnographic study with the Pergamon Museum in Germany, in how they constructed and de/contextualized the modern concept of “Islamic art” through their display strategies. She has also examined the roles arts and crafts fulfilled in the making of the Lebanese identity from the French Mandate to the first exhibition of Islamic art in Lebanon on the eve of the Civil War in 1974. In 2022, she published an article on this subject, “Imagining Lebanon with Islamic Art: The 1974 Exhibition at the Nicolas Sursock Museum.”

Sabban currently teaches Islamic art history courses at LAU. She previously taught courses in Arab and Middle Eastern History, Islamic art history, and anthropology at AUB.