Iheb Guermazi

Iheb Guermazi is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Southern California. His work focuses on the 19th and 20th century Muslim world, exploring the relationship between Islamic thought, modern political formations, and aesthetics. He is broadly interested in modern theories of art and architecture rooted in non-Western intellectual traditions, with particular attention to comparative aesthetics, the philosophy of art, postcolonial theory, and critical debates on the decolonization of knowledge.

His current book project, The Eyes that Saw the Prophet: A Braided History of Art, reconstructs the intellectual history of a modern Sufi theory of art. The book traces how, between the mid-nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, a Sufi lineage of mystics, artists, and anti-colonial leaders developed a coherent theory of art rooted in Sufi concepts and vocabulary. It argues that this theory emerged as a Muslim response to European imperialism, advancing original conceptions of beauty, authorship, time, and artistic knowledge that challenge conventional narratives of modern art and modernism. More broadly, it asks how art theories are born, how they travel across generations and cultures, and how religious traditions continue to shape modern artistic thought. Methodologically, the project proposes a “braided history”: a way of writing intellectual history from within the conceptual worlds of the traditions it studies, following their own lineages of transmission and exchange.

Alongside his scholarly research, Guermazi is active as both curator and architect. His architectural and curatorial projects have been exhibited internationally, including at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, Konsthall C in Stockholm, the Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah, and the Sharjah Architecture Triennial. He received his Ph.D. in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), an M.Sc. from the University of Washington, and an M.Arch. from the University of Carthage, Tunisia. Before joining USC, he was a fellow at the Columbia University Society of Fellows in the Humanities. His research has been supported by major institutions and fellowships, including the Fulbright Program, the Harvard University Center for European Studies, the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), the MIT Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, and the Columbia University Heyman Center for the Humanities.