Heba Alnajada

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Heba Alnajada (BA, University of Jordan; MA, University of Sheffield; PhD University of California, Berkeley) is Assistant Professor of Global Modern and Contemporary Architecture in the History of Art & Architecture Department at Boston University. She is an architectural historian who works at the intersection of the built environment, refugees, the modern history of the Middle East, and (increasingly) the law. Her research and teaching focus on global architectural history, urbanism, migration, and the Arab and Muslim worlds. 

Her current book project, tentatively titled Hijra, Land, Camps, Sanctuary: Genealogies of Refuge in Amman counters the normative discourse that positions the camp at the center of modern refugee history by recovering an alternative genealogy of refuge that starts from the Islamic Prophet’s migration from Mecca to Medina and leaps forward to late 19th-century Ottoman lands offered as shelter for Muslim refugees and then moves to the global transplantation of the refugee camp typology in the wake of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 and ending with the recovery of Arabo-Islamic traditions of sanctuary activated by ordinary people to aid Syrian family members and friends on the heels of the 2011 Syrian revolution-turned-war. This book pushes the boundaries of architectural history to not only include spaces and cultures traditionally positioned outside of refugee history but to recenter Arab and Muslim worlds as sites that produce spaces of refuge, that is, not just as humanitarian sites that are acted upon. More broadly, this research contributes to ongoing debates on decentering the West from refugee history, on refugee hospitality, and to camp studies debates on what a refugee camp is and what it does. Her second major project turns to the desert, grounding the smuggling of building materials and thermal comfort devices within an environmental history of the Syrian Badia (a semi-arid area that stretches across present-day Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia). Her research has been supported by numerous grants, including Mellon/ACLS, the IJURR Foundation, and the Critical Refugee Studies Collective. 

 Professor Alnajada teaches undergraduate courses at Boston University, including “Global Modern and Contemporary Architecture.” She also teaches seminars on such topics as the global history of camps and methods of inquiry in architectural history. 

 She also has experience in architecture and urban practice. She co-founded Arini, a socially engaged architecture practice with which she has worked on projects in Palestinian and Syrian refugee camps and curatorial projects, in addition to herskhazeen.com, an online magazine for urbanism, architecture, and design in the Arab world. She has also worked on various urban development and heritage documentation projects in Yemen, Libya, Abu Dhabi, Jordan, and Palestine. 

 Professor Alnajada welcomes inquiries from prospective graduate students interested in working on issues of migration, the Middle East, the Global South, and spatial politics. 

Curriculum Vitae

Selected Publications

	“‘This Camp Is Full of Hujaj!’: Claims to Land and the Built Environment in a Contested Palestinian Refugee Camp in Amman.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 43, no. 3 (December 1, 2023): 275–92.
	Mapping Jabal Al-Nathif. Berlin: Heinrich Böll Foundation. Barcelona: Apograf publishers, 2014. (Full book)