Samer Akkach is a professor of architecture history and theory and the founding director of the Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He has published widely on the theory of architecture and landscape, Islamic art and architecture, and Islamic intellectual history in the early modern period with special attention to Syria. He is the author of Cosmology and Architecture in Premodern Islam: An Architectural Reading of Mystical Ideas (2005); ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī: Islam and the Enlightenment (2007); Letters of a Sufi Scholar: The Correspondence of ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (2010); Intimate Invocations: Al-Ghazzī’s Biography of ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (2012), Damascene Diaries: A Reading of the Cultural History of Damascus in the Eighteenth Century (2015); and Istanbul Observatory (2017).