page_title: Oleg Grabar
section_title: Research
hierarchical_section_title: Oleg Grabar / Research
caption_attribution_description: English: The Dome of The Rock Mosque, in the temple mount.
context_page_description: Oleg Grabar was a French-born art historian and archeologist, who spent most of his career in the United States, as a leading figure in the field of Islamic art and architecture.
context_section_description: Grabar's archeological and scholarly research covered a wide range of Islamic studies across Africa, the Middle East, and Muslim Asia.
  Early in his career, Grabar spent two years (1953 and 1960–1961) at the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem. From 1964 to 1972, he directed excavations on a Medieval Islamic town at Qasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi, Syria, work later described in a two-volume book he coauthored, City in the Desert, Qasr al-Hayr East.  Other major books in English include The Shape of the Holy (Princeton, 1996), The Mediation of Ornament (Princeton, 1992), The Great Mosque of Isfahan (NYU, 1990),  and The Formation of Islamic Art (Yale, 1973).
  Oleg Grabar also did scholarly work on the Persian miniature. With Sheila Blair, he coauthored an illustrated study of a major Shahnameh manuscript, Epic Images and Contemporary History: The Illustrations of the Great Mongol Shahnama (Chicago, 1980). He was also a noted scholar of the Dome of the Rock, after the appearance of his article "The Umayyad Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem."  His work Penser l'art islamique : une esthétique de l'ornement  denotes also reflections on the nature of Islamic art.
caption: Dome of the Rock in the Old City of Jerusalem.
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