Curriculum Vitae of Mercedes Volait

Mercedes Volait is CNRS Research Professor at INHA (the Institut national d’histoire de l’art) in Paris.  In 2008, she founded at INHA, InVisu, a research lab that studies the history of modern and contemporary art and architecture via visual and material culture, while drawing on methods from digital humanities.  She directed InVisu for ten years, until 2018, and remains an active member.

Educated in the fields of architecture, Middle Eastern studies, and art history, Mercedes Volait is an architectural historian of modern Egypt.  Her current research, reflected in Antique Dealing and Creative Reuse in Cairo and Damascus 1850-1890 (Brill 2021), focuses on the global outreach and consumption of architecture and craft from Egypt during the long nineteenth century, with particular attention to aesthetic interiors, Islamic-style furniture, art collecting, topographical photography, and cross-cultural exchanges.

Volait has held Visiting Professorships at Leiden University (2017), Cairo University (2015) and Geneva University (2012).  She has also held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (2010) and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic architecture at Harvard University (2009). As an associate researcher at the Victoria and Albert Museum from 2015 to 2019, she studied the history of the V&A’s collection of Islamic art from Egypt and Syria and is preparing a book on the subject with Moya Carey.

She has published numerous volumes on the history of architecture and heritage in modern Egypt, including 6 monographs and 12 collections of essays, as well as a digital catalogue of topographical views of Cairo taken from 1875 to 1895  http://facchinelli.huma-num.fr/

She was awarded the CNRS Silver Medal in 2022.