Stephennie Mulder is Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a specialist in Islamic art, architectural history, and archaeology. Mulder worked for over ten years as the head ceramicist for the Syrian-Princeton excavations at Balis, a medieval Islamic city in Syria, and has also conducted archaeological and art historical fieldwork throughout Syria, Egypt, Turkey, and elsewhere in the region. Her research interests include Islamic architectural history, Islamic archaeology and archaeological ceramics, the art and architecture of Shi’ism, material culture studies, theories of ornament and mimesis, place and landscape studies, and digital media in the teaching of archaeology and art history.
Mulder works on the conservation of antiquities and cultural heritage sites endangered by war and illegal trafficking. She is a consultant for the U.S. Department of State and the Customs and Border Patrol’s Antiquities Unit on the identification of looted and trafficked archaeological objects and a former consultant for SHOSI (the Saving the Heritage of Syria and Iraq initiative), sponsored by the Penn Cultural Heritage Center, the Smithsonian Institute, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Syrian Heritage Initiative of ASOR (American Society of Overseas Research). In 2015, Dr. Mulder, along with students, faculty and staff, founded UT Antiquities Action, a group that raises awareness about threats to cultural heritage around the world. The group hosts monthly meetings and an annual symposium.
Mulder’s book The Shrines of the ‘Alids in Medieval Syria: Sunnis, Shi’s and the Architecture of Coexistence(Edinburgh, 2014) received the UT Austin Hamilton Book Award Grand Prize, the Syrian Studies Association Award, and Iran’s World Prize for Book of the Year. The book was also selected as an ALA Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title. Her edited volume Imagining Antiquity in Islamic Societies (Intellect, 2022) was an expansion of her 2017 special issue of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture. Mulder’s current project is The Ceramics of Balis, a two-volume study of the medieval ceramics excavated during the Syrian-Princeton excavations, and she is currently working on a video game based on the excavation and the history of the site.
Mulder’s research has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Barakat Trust, the Archaeological Institute of America, the German Archaeological Institute (DAI), and the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin. She has appeared in media interviews and written editorials for media outlets such as the BBC, NY Times, Time, al-Jazeera, the L.A. Times, and others on cultural heritage issues, Islamic art, antiquities, and the history of sectarian relations in Islam.