D. Fairchild Ruggles Explained

D. Fairchild Ruggles
Nationality:American
Occupation:Historian of Islamic art
Years Active:2000–present
Notable Works:Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain

D. (Dede) Fairchild Ruggles[1] is an American historian of Islamic art and architecture, and a professor in the University of Illinois Department of Landscape Architecture. She is known for her books on Islamic gardens and landscapes, her series of edited volumes on cultural heritage, and her award-winning work in gender history.

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Professor Ruggles holds the Debra Mitchell Endowed Chair in Landscape Architecture.

Biography

D. Fairchild Ruggles gained her bachelor's degree cum laude in Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She gained her master's degree and doctorate in History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania.[2] She held teaching posts at Cornell, Harvard, Binghamton University, and Ithaca College. In 2000, she went to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign as a tenured Associate Professor; she became full Professor in 2007. She has held the Debra Mitchell Chair in Landscape Architecture since 2018, with additional appointments in Art History, Architecture, Spanish & Portuguese, and Gender & Women's Studies.[3]

Ruggles has written on a wide range of topics. She has served as the Art and Architecture Field Editor for the Encyclopaedia of Islam since 2016. She is known for her studies of the landscapes and gardens of the Islamic world and its diasporas, including those in South Asia and the Islamic Golden Age of al-Andalus. Her books have been translated into at least 9 languages.

Scholarship

Just as Islamic culture is historically complex, so too is the history of its landscapes. Ruggles traces the earliest Islamic gardens to the need to organize the surrounding space of human civilization, tame nature, enhance the earth's yield, and create a legible map for the distribution of agricultural and natural resources. Cautioning against the too-easy simplification of Islamic gardens as having a single meaning or reflecting a single identity, she has described these gardens as "expressions of memory, place-making, humankind's position in the great cosmos, the imagination, rationality, political power, and the yearning for eternity."[4]

Ruggles is also a scholar of gender. In her introduction to Women, Patronage, and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies (2000), she queried modern conceptions of agency, asking what forms of power were held by Muslim women in the 8th through 19th centuries.[5]

Awards and distinctions

Distinctions include National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, appointment to the NEH Muslim Bookshelf project with the American Library Association, and a grant to co-direct an NEH Summer Institute in Granada, Spain; a fellowship from the American Council for Learned Societies; a fellowship from the Getty Grant Program and appointment to co-direct a multi-year project "Mediterranean Palimpsests"; fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art; a residency at Shangri La from the Doris Duke Foundation; and an appointment as Visiting Scholar at Dumbarton Oaks.[10]

Reception

Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain

Shirine Hamadeh, in Review of Middle East Studies, called the book a "compelling study of seven centuries of Islamic garden and landscape tradition in the Iberian peninsula". She writes that Ruggles assembles a wide variety of types of evidence – archaeology, history, poetry, agricultural writings, and paintings – to show that a new "landscape vocabulary" was created at Madinat al-Zahra, Cordoba, in the tenth century, and that this spread across al-Andalus until it reached its zenith at the Alhambra palace.[11]

Maria Rosa Menocal, in The Medieval Review, wrote that "Ruggles's always clear narrative interweaves all the fundamental threads of the historical and political events necessary to fully appreciate the cultural bases of everything that had to do with that dramatic transformation of the Iberian landscape. She seems as at home talking about the changing yields of crop harvests as about the variations in the concepts of paradise as a garden across different cultures."[12]

The book was reviewed in The Burlington Magazine in 2001.[13]

Islamic Gardens and Landscapes

Laura E. Parodi, in Journal of Islamic Studies, wrote that the book offered material for reflection on some difficult questions, such as how to define an "Islamic" artefact.[14]

The Foundation for Landscape Studies wrote that "Ruggles uses poetry, court documents, agronomy manuals, and early garden representations to immerse the reader in the world of the architects of the great gardens of the Islamic world, from medieval Morocco to contemporary India. Western admirers have long seen the Islamic garden as an earthly reflection of the paradise said to await the faithful. Such simplification, Ruggles contends, denies the sophistication and diversity of the art form. Just as Islamic culture is historically dense, sophisticated, and complex, so too is the history of its built landscapes. She follows the evolution of early Islamic agricultural efforts to their aristocratic apex in the formal gardens of the Alhambra in Spain and the Taj Mahal in Agra."[15]

Tree of Pearls

Elizabeth Urban, reviewing the book in the American Journal of Islam and Society, notes that Shajar al-Durr, Arabic for "Tree of Pearls", was a rare example of a female Sultan, distinguished further by having been a slave. Urban comments that Ruggles emphasizes al-Durr's effect on Islamic architecture through her patronage of new buildings in Cairo. Urban calls Ruggles's description of al-Durr's rise to power "a gripping account". She writes that Ruggles makes the suggestion that since al-Durr could not present herself publicly, "she instead used ... public architecture to create larger-than-life, self-aggrandizing monuments to both herself and her husband." In her view, Tree of Pearls "is a lucid introduction to Shajar al-Durr’s career and especially her mastery of the symbolic language of public architecture."[16]

Works

Written

Edited

Films and media

Writer / Presenter

Appearances

External links

Notes and References

  1. Web site: D. Fairchild Ruggles: Professor of art, architecture and landscape history: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign . Center for the Study of the Built Environment . 10 February 2018.
  2. Web site: D. Fairchild Ruggles, Ph.D. . University of Illinois . February 9, 2018.
  3. Web site: D. Fairchild Ruggles . Illinois University . April 21, 2021.
  4. Book: Ruggles, D. Fairchild . Islamic gardens and landscapes . University of Pennsylvania Press . 2008 . 978-0-8122-0728-6 . Philadelphia . 144 . 811411235.
  5. Book: Ruggles, D. F. . Women, patronage, and self-representation in Islamic societies . State University of New York Press . 2000 . 978-0-7914-4469-6 . Albany . 6–7 . 42765021.
  6. Web site: Ruggles . D. F. . Department of Landscape Architecture . live. https://web.archive.org/web/20150324081840/http://landarch.illinois.edu:80/faculty/d-fairchild-ruggles . 2015-03-24 .
  7. Web site: Islamic Gardens and Landscapes D. Fairchild Ruggles . University of Pennsylvania Press . 10 February 2018.
  8. Web site: Allen G. Noble Book Award . International Society for Landscape, Place, & Material Culture . 10 February 2018.
  9. Web site: Previous Award Recipients . 2021-04-20 . American Society of Overseas Research.
  10. Web site: Ruggles . D. Fairchild . Curriculum Vitae . Illinois University . 21 April 2021.
  11. Hamadeh . Shirine . Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain, by D. Fairchild Ruggles. 264 pages, notes, bibliography, index, color/b&w illustrations. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. $65.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-271-01851-8 . . Cambridge University Press . 35 . 1 . 2001 . 0026-3184 . 10.1017/s0026318400041742 . 86–87 . 164622407 .
  12. 01.08.10, Ruggles, Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain: The Medieval Review . The Medieval Review . August 2001 . 2021-04-20 . Indiana University.
  13. [Review] Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain . . 2001 . 143 . 2 (1175) . 102.
  14. Parodi . Laura E. . [Review] Islamic Gardens and Landscapes By D. Fairchild Ruggles . . 2010 . 21 . 3 . 439–443 . 10.1093/jis/etq029.
  15. Web site: 2009 Jackson Book Prize . 2021-04-20 . Foundation for Landscape Studies.
  16. Tree of Pearls . American Journal of Islam and Society . International Institute of Islamic Thought . 39 . 3-4 . 16 February 2023 . 2690-3741 . 10.35632/ajis.v39i3-4.3163 . 189–192. free .
  17. Web site: Bridging Cultures Bookshelf: Muslim Journeys. 2021-04-20. bridgingcultures-muslimjourneys.org.
  18. Web site: The Ornament of the World: Kikim Media . 2021-04-20.
  19. Web site: Islamic Art: Mirror of the Invisible World . PBS . en. 2021-04-20.
  20. Web site: Ancient Megastructures . https://web.archive.org/web/20100605075831/http://natgeotv.com/ca/ancient-megastructures . dead . June 5, 2010 . 2021-04-20 . National Geographic - Videos, TV Shows & Photos - Canada.
  21. Web site: Perspectives on Faith - D. Fairchild Ruggles . . 2021-04-20.
  22. Web site: Cities of Light: The Rise and Fall of Islamic Spain PBS. . 2021-04-20.

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