Damascus

Dr Stefan Weber is the Director of the Museum of Islamic Art at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, Germany. He has served as Assistant Professor at Aga Khan University in London, and he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Orient-Institute Beirut (OIB), and he was a Junior Research Fellow at the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) in Damascus for the History of Islamic Art and Architecture.

"Stefan Weber is to be complemented for producing such an outstanding and profoundly impressive work which sets a standard in the field. Damascus: Ottoman Modernity and Urban Transformation, 1808-1918 will be hard to supersede. The Danish Institute in Damascus is also to be commended for including this book in its proceedings." Abdul-Karim Rafeq William and Annie Bickers Professor of Arab Middle Eastern Studies,Emeritus, The College of William and Mary in Virginia (Book Reviews / Turkish Historical Review 4 (2013) 225240) "The books lavish illustrationsover 1,300, not counting local street plansdeserve particular admiration. Virtually every point Weber makes is supported by at least one and sometimes several pictorial examples, drawn from an array of sources among which Webers own photos, the privatecollection of Wolf-Dieter Lemke, and the public collection of the Library of Congress are only the most notable. Copious and detailed primary and secondary source references in the footnotes support the argument throughout and offer numerous avenues for further reading. The book isbeautifully produced: the designer and indexer are rightly credited by name." "...this book is a magnificent monument to the built heritage of Damascus and the lives of countless Damascenes. Photos of crumbling walls and decaying interiors, and many a comment in the text(especially in the catalog), make clear that that heritage was under threat when the research was carried out, between the late 1990s and late 2000s.It is under much greater threat now." - Benjamin Thomas White, Arab Studies Journal