Olga Bush: What Gifts Have to Say: Islamic Luxury Objects in the Mediterranean Context

Olga Bush received her Ph.D. in Islamic Art and Architecture at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She has taught at the State University of New York at New Paltz and Vassar College, and worked as a Curatorial Fellow and later as a Senior Research Fellow in the Islamic Department at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She has also been a Scholar-in-Residence at the Doris Duke Foundation-Shangri La in Honolulu, Hawai'i. She has published on architecture and poetic epigraphy in the Alhambra; visual perception in medieval optics and architectural design; fourteenth-century Islamic textiles; and the architecture of Jewish identity in the Neo-Islamic Central Synagogue of New York. She is currently serving as a member of the Executive Board of Historians of Islamic Art Association and as the HIAA Newsletter Editor.