Walid Akef is a PhD candidate at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and a William R. Tyler fellow at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections. Walid specializes in Islamic architectural history of the pre-modern Mediterranean world, focusing on North Africa, southern Italy, and Iberia. His research examines the periurban and suburban landscapes of power manifested in the agricultural-recreational estates that proliferated in the western Islamic world before their re-emergence in Renaissance Italy. His research interests also include the use of art for political propaganda, cultural interchanges in the Mediterranean basin, and the historiography of Islamic art in English, Arabic, and Spanish intellectual circles. Walid received his BA in Islamic Archaeology from Ain Shams University (Cairo, Egypt) in 2008, earned MA in Art History from Granada University (Granada, Spain) in 2015, and an MA in Muslim Cultures from the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (the Aga Khan University, London, UK) in 2019. Walid has worked as teaching fellow at Ain Shams University and at Harvard University, and has published in Arabic, Spanish, and English in regional and international journals. His research has been supported by the Aga Khan Program at Harvard, Villa I Tatti in Florence, the Center for African Studies and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, and Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC.