Michael A. Lally (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate researching the architecture and material culture of East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean under the supervision of Dr. Emily Neumeier. His dissertation focuses on applied phenomenology, collection practices, and the interaction of the beholder, architecture, and material culture in nineteenth-century Southern Arabia, the Swahili Coast, and the Horn of Africa, specifically bridges and dhows from Mombasa, amuletic necklaces from Somalia, flag fans from Arabia and Sudan, and hand crosses from Ethiopia. His additional interests include liminality in vernacular architecture and spolia/reuse. Lally received his BA in art history and theoretical physics from Middlebury College. His undergraduate art history thesis focused on themes of reciprocity and procession in the mosaics of Ravenna’s San Vitale. 

Lally has taught several courses at Temple, including "The Art of the Crusades from Multiple Perspectives" and "Marine Painting," for which the Temple presented the Tyler Art History Department Graduate Teaching Award to him. Temple awarded Lally a digital humanities scholarship to create a GIS project tracing Byzantine artifacts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He also received a fellowship from the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library and the Art History Dissertation Completion Scholarship. Lally has also worked as a Museum Coordinator at the Gloucester County Historical Society Museum and taught at Rowan University.

Dissertation Title: To Wear and To See: Object Biographies and The History of Mobility in the Late Nineteenth-Century Early Twentieth-Century Western Indian Ocean