Nezar AlSayyad is an architect, planner, urban historian and a public intellectual. He is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Architecture and Planning, at the University of California at Berkeley where he was Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies for two decades. In 1988, AlSayyad co-founded the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE) and served as its first President for two decades, and he still serves as the Editor of the Association's highly acclaimed peer-reviewed journal Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review (TDSR). AlSayyad writings have spanned many disciplines including research on tradition, heritage and globalization and their connection to the built environment. He is the author, co-author, or editor of many books among them: Forms of Dominance (1992); Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage (2001); The End of Tradition (2003); Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real (2006); The Fundamentalist City (2012); and Traditions: The Real, the Hyper and the Virtual in the Built Environment (2014); and the major Encyclopedic volume Cairo: The Routledge Handbook of Histories, Representations and Discourses, 2023. AlSayyad is the recipient of many grants and awards for his research and in 2008, the University of California at Berkeley awarded him, the Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest honor Berkeley bestows on its faculty. In 2015, AlSayyad was awarded a Distinguished Guggenheim Fellowship.
