Ozayr Saloojee

Born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, Professor Saloojee previously taught at the University of Minnesota’s School of Architecture, where he was appointed the University of Minnesota’s 2014-2016 Imagine Chair in the Arts, Design and Humanities and served as affiliate faculty in Landscape Architecture and in the Religious Studies Program. Before moving to the USA in 2005, he studied, taught and practiced architecture in Ottawa, receiving his B.Arch and Post-professional M.Arch II (Theory and Culture) from Carleton University. He completed his doctoral research (on the early Islamic landscape of Cape Town, South Africa) at the Bartlett School of Architecture (University College London), and currently serves as the Associate Editor of Design for the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE).

At Carleton’s School of Architecture since January 2017 as an Associate Professor, and cross appointed at the Institute for African Studies, he teaches courses in architectural design, urbanism and history & theory. His research focuses on politically contested terrains through the intersections of architecture, landscape, cultural geographies and geo-imaginaries. He maintains research and scholarly interests in the Islamic world, focusing on questions of tradition and modernity in Islamic art and architecture, with an emphasis on Ottoman architecture and the spiritual ethos in the works of Sinan. He has served as a reviewer for the International Journal of Islamic Architecture and his doctoral work will be published as an invited chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Religious Space (forthcoming, 2022), and with Intellect books (forthcoming).