Alex Dika Seggerman is Assistant Professor of Art History at Rutgers University-Newark. She is the author of Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt between the Islamic and the Contemporary (UNC Press, 2019) and co-author of Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean (Indiana University Press, 2022).

Her lecture titled, Constellational Modernism in Egypt, will discuss her recently published book, Modernism on the Nile, in which she traces the arc of Egyptian modernism in art from nineteenth-century visual culture through the post-surrealist painting of the 1960s. Part of the larger field of Global Modernisms, the book expands modern art history outside its traditional centers and pushes Islamic art history into the modern period. Focusing on major artists like Mahmoud Mukhtar, Mahmoud Said, Inji Efflatoun, and Abdel Hadi El-Gazzar, Seggerman argues that Egyptian artists employed a conceptual and aesthetic approach of “constellational modernism” to visualize the finite connections of their art-making.