This theme was developed by D. Fairchild Ruggles, Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received her A.B. in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard and M.A. and Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught art, architectural, landscape, and cultural history at universities that include Cornell, Binghamton, and Harvard. Her first book, the award-winning Garden, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain (2000), explored the complex cultural conditions that gave rise to the built landscape of al-Andalus, and in her award-winning Islamic Gardens and Landscapes (2008), she extends this to the Islamic world as a whole. Her other publications include a series of volumes on cultural heritage, and Islamic Art and Visual Culture: An Anthology of Sources (2011).
