Temple University

Emily Neumeier is a historian who studies the art and architecture of the Islamic world, with a focus on the eastern Mediterranean and Ottoman Empire. Her research and teaching cover a wide range of topics, including architecture and urban memory, cultural heritage, postcolonial theory, Islamic calligraphy, and transnational networks of artistic exchange in the modern era.

Her first book, Architectural Revolution on the Ottoman Frontier: Greece and Albania in the Age of Ali Pasha (Penn State Press, 2025) presents an alternative history of Ottoman architectural patronage from the borderlands of empire during the Age of Revolutions. Neumeier has also co-edited the volume Hagia Sophia in the Long Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), which examines the making of a modern monument in the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic. She is currently preparing a book-length study on Florida Orientalism, a project that investigates the role of historical revival architecture in selling the Sunshine State as an exotic land of fantasy and leisure in the first half of the 20th century, well before Disney set his sights on Orlando. 

Neumeier’s archival and field research has been supported by the Fulbright Program, Getty Research Institute, American Council of Learned Societies, Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University, American Research Institute in Turkey, and the Society of Architectural Historians. Before coming to Tyler, she taught at Ohio State University as an ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow and was a Research Collaborator in the Max Planck Research Group "Objects in the Contact Zone: The Cross-Cultural Lives of Things" at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, Italy.

In the classroom, Neumeier encourages her students to explore emerging technologies in their own research and engage in public scholarship. She is the executive producer of the Monument Biography podcast series, among other projects in new media.

Selected Works

Neumeier, E. (2025). Architectural Revolution on the Ottoman Frontier: Greece and Albania in the Age of Ali Pasha. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University.

Neumeier, E. (2025). Constructing Orientalism in Interwar Florida. In Caroline ‘Olivia’ M. Wolf (Ed.), Islamic and Islamicate Architecture in the Americas (pp. 137-156). Bristol, UK: Intellect.

Neumeier, E. and Anderson, B., eds (2024). Hagia Sophia in the Long Nineteenth Century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 

Neumeier, E. (2022). The Muybridge Albums in Istanbul: Photography as Diplomacy in the Ottoman Empire. In M. Graves and A. Seggerman (Eds.), Making Modernity: Art and Architecture in the Nineteenth-Century Islamic Mediterranean (pp. 94-113). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Neumeier, E. (2022). Mohamed Zakariya and Contemporary Islamic Art. In N. Micklewright (Ed.), Mohamed Zakariya: The Life and Times of a 21st century Calligrapher (pp. 85-94). Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae.

Neumeier, E. and Steiner, S. (2021). "A Church is Never Just a Church": Hagia Sophia and the Mutability of Monuments. Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 8(1), 215-221. 

Neumeier, E. (2021). Portrait of Ali Pasha: Cultural Mobility on the Periphery of Empire. In E. Troelenberg, K. Schankweiler, and A. Messner (Eds.), Reading Objects in the Contact Zone (pp. 172-178). Heidelberg: University of Heidelberg.

Neumeier, E. (2020). The Paintings of Osman Hamdi Bey. Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, University of Michigan. Online video.

Neumeier, E. (2020). Trans-imperial Encounter on the Ionian Sea: A French Engineer’s Account of Constructing Ottoman Fortifications. In S. Pradines (Ed.), Ports and Fortifications in the Muslim World: Coastal Military Architecture from the Arab Conquest to the Ottoman Period (pp. 217-236). Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale.

Neumeier, E. (2019). Mediating Legacies of Empire in the Post-Imperial Museum. History and Anthropology 30(4), 406-420.

Neumeier, E. (2017). Spoils for the New Pyrrhus: Alternative Claims to Antiquity in Ottoman Greece. International Journal of Islamic Architecture 6(2), 311-338.