ISAW PhD student Nour Ammari Awarded 2026-27 Amman Prize

ISAW congratulates PhD candidate Nour Ammari on being named a 2026–2027 Amman Prize recipient. The Amman Prize supports four months of research and residence in Jordan for graduate students pursuing dissertation research in scientific, social scientific, or humanistic fields whose principal concern is Jordan, ancient, modern, or contemporary. Awardees receive a monthly stipend, room and board, and a private workspace at the American Center of Research.

Ammari specializes in late antique and early Islamic visual culture in the Southern Levant from the fifth to tenth centuries CE. Her dissertation, “Arabic-Inscribed Oil Lamps from Northern Jordan: Everyday Religion and Craft Production in the Byzantine-Islamic Transition,” examines inscribed portable objects from present-day Northern Jordan during the transitional period surrounding the centralization of the first Islamic state.

Her cross-disciplinary approach draws on art historical, archaeological, and textual methods. She holds an MA in Art History from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago. Her theoretical interests include new materialism and object-oriented ontology, object biography and itinerary, the historiography of early Islam, and exhibition and reception studies.

Ammari’s fieldwork and professional experience reflect the range of her commitments. She has excavated for three seasons at Siniya Island, Umm al-Quwain, UAE, and held an Islamic Curatorial Fellowship at the American Numismatic Society in the summer of 2025. At ISAW, she served as an exhibitions practicum student in 2022, contributing to Through the Lens: Latif al-Ani’s Visions of Ancient Iraq, and continued with the exhibitions team on Madinat al-Zahra: The Radiant Capital of Islamic Spain, for which she developed online materials and curated a selection of Spanish Umayyad coins for gallery display.