As Supervisor:
Rehab Salama [Dr. O. Saloojee, Supervisor; Committee: Dr. Menna Agha]
The Metaphysics of Compassion: Al-Waqf as an Expression of Barakah, in Everyday Cairo
Rehab Salama is a PhD student at the School of Architecture & Urbanism (ASAU) at Carleton University, where she also received her Master of Architecture (2021) and her Bachelor of Architectural Studies (2018). During her time at Carleton, Rehab has contributed as a Teaching Assistant as well as a Research Assistant at the Carleton Immersive Media Studio (CIMS), where she specialized in Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Heritage Building Information Modelling (HBIM). Currently, Rehab is a practicing OAA Intern Architect at Moriyama Teshima Architects. Her research investigates the relationship between the sacred and the everyday within the context of Cairo, Egypt, with a particular focus on Islamic cosmology and spaces of compassion.
Serkan Taycan [Dr. O. Saloojee, Supervisor; Committee: Dr. Lisa Moffit, Dr. David Hugill (Geography)]
Walking “Between Two Seas:” Mobile Observations on the Peripheries of Istanbul
Serkan Taycan is an artist and academic with a background in engineering and documentary photography. Taycan completed his MA degree in Visual Arts at Sabancı University, Istanbul and in Photography at Aalto University, Helsinki. He is currently a doctoral student at the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University, Ottawa. In his research-based artistic practice, Taycan focuses on the dynamics of ecological and urban transformations; and uses media such as photography, video, mapping, and walking. His works have been exhibited in various venues including Venice Architectural Biennial, Istanbul Biennial, Helsinki Photography Biennial, Mardin Biennial, Sinop Biennial, Cappadox, and Thessaloniki Photography Biennale as well as MAXXI, MuCEM, Malmö Museum, SALT, Pera Museum, Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, and Sakıp Sabancı Museum. His book, Agora #04: Taksim, was published in 2017. He held artist residencies at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, in 2015 and at Delfina Foundation, London, in 2016. Between 2016–2018, he taught courses on urban culture and visual arts as a part-time faculty member at Bilgi and Bahçeşehir Universities in Istanbul. Taycan also gave lectures and led practice seminars and workshops at Iceland Academy of the Arts (Reykjavík), Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology (Bangalore) and Leeds Arts University. In his PhD research, he focuses on how infrastructural interventions alter water bodies, and their transformative effects on border ecologies.
Ushma Thakrar [Dr. O. Saloojee, Supervisor; Committee: Dr. Menna Agha, Dr. Ateya Khorakiwala: Columbia]
Constructing Nationalist Modernity Through Architectural Images of Cleanliness in Late- Colonial India, 1911-1947
Ushma is Ph.D. student at the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism. She holds previous degrees from the Architectural Association, Columbia University, and Carleton University. Prior to joining the program, she has held positions at several cultural institutions, including the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal, arc en rêve centre d’architecture in Bordeaux, and the Remai Modern in Saskatoon and has taught at Waterloo University and the Architectural Association. Her research investigates the role of domestic architectural aesthetics in the modernization projects of imperialization and independence in late-colonial India.
Dr. Rana Abughannam [Dr. O. Saloojee, Supervisor; Committee: Dr. Federica Goffi, Dr. Salim Tamari (Georgetown + Birzeit), Dr. Anooradha Siddiqui (Barnard/Columbia)]
Counter-Colonial: Spatial Forms of Resistance in Hebron, Palestine
Dr. Rana Abughannam defended her PhD at the School School of Architecture and Urbanism in 2023, and she is currently an Assistant Professor of Architecture the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. She obtained her professional degree in Architectural Engineering from Birzeit University in 2012 and was granted her post-professional Master’s of Architecture degree from the History and Theory Program at McGill University’s School of Architecture in 2013. Rana is a Registered Architect in both Palestine and Jordan, where she practiced as a freelance architect. She is co-founder and a coordinator to CR|PT|C (Carleton Research | Practice of Teaching | Collaborative) which pursues research in the humanities with a diverse research agenda that reflects the interests of the collaborators through the Practice of Teaching in academic settings in architecture. Prior to joining Carleton, Rana had taught at the Canadian University Dubai as a visiting lecturer at the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences and an adjunct lecturer at the School of Architecture and Interior Design. Between 2013 and 2015, Rana was also an instructor at the Department of Architecture at Birzeit University teaching courses including history of architecture, architectural representation, and architectural design studios. Her research interests revolve around architecture and urbanity and the socio-political conditions which govern them. Her Ph.D. dissertation builds on her previous research and focuses on spatial forms of colonialism and resistance in Palestine.
Dr. Jenan Ghazal (Dr. O. Saloojee, Supervisor (w/ Dr. Jurek Elzanowski); Committee: Dr. Claudio Sgarbi)
Locating Spatial Violence in Beirut: The Line, the Wall and the Tower
Dr. Jenan Ghazal, defended her PhD at the School of Architecture at Carleton University in November, 2024, and was affiliated with the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations (NMC) at the University of Toronto. She was nominated as a Teaching Fellow in Fall 2020 where she taught a history/theory course titled: Reporting from the front: on architecture, politics, and spatial violence. She holds a BArch (2012) and a MArch (2014) from the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Lebanon, where she also has professional experience as a licensed architect. Before holding a Master of Architectural Studies (MAS, 2016) from Carleton University, Jenan was involved with community-based activism and documentation of endangered heritage buildings in her hometown Tripoli, Lebanon. By dwelling upon her firsthand experience of urban conflicts following upheavals in Lebanon, her research addresses the question of spatial violence as a continuous immanence in the architecture of our cities. She has presented papers in Canada and internationally on historical and contemporary entanglements of architecture, political violence, and the body in urban spaces. She has received various awards in Lebanon and Canada, most recently a SSHRC Doctoral award (2020)
Reem Awad (Dr. O. Saloojee, Supervisor, Co-advisor: Dr. Stephen Fai; Committee: Dr. Suzy Harris Brandts)
The Temporary: Time, Erasure, Suspension and Empowerment in Silwan, Palestine
Reem Awad is a PhD student at the School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University. She holds a professional Master of Architecture degree from Carleton University (2019) and a professional degree in Architectural Engineering from An-Najah National University (2012) in Palestine. Reem is a registered architect in Palestine, where she worked at a couple of architecture and engineering construction companies (2012-2017). Her research investigates the socio-cultural and spatio-political implications of the ‘temporary’ in Palestine. Focusing on Occupied East Jerusalem, her work examines the settler-colonial instrumentalization of the ‘temporary’ for spatio-political domination and Palestinians’ forms of resistance to the ‘temporary.’ She has been awarded the SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship (2022-2025) for her doctoral research. In addition to her doctoral research, since 2018, she has been working at Carleton Immersive Media Studio (CIMS), developing workflows for digital documentation and storytelling of historical sites. During her work at CIMS, she has led digital documentation projects of two UNESCO World Heritage sites in Cyprus and Myanmar.
Cynthia Lapp (Dr. O. Saloojee, Supervisor, as Affiliate Faculty in the College of Interdisciplinary Sciences at Royal Roads University, Vancouver; Co-advisor: Dr. Marilyn Taylor and Dr. Virgina McKendry)
Intrinsic Darkness: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Ameliorating Light Pollution
Cynthia heads research and outreach with Starry Skies Lake Superior, a non-profit organization dedicated to the reduction of light pollution in the Lake Superior region. Lapp leverages the power of participatory engagement to change individual behavior and infrastructure decision-making to reduce the human impact of artificial light on human health, ecological functions and cultural values in connecting with the night sky. She works with non-profits and stakeholders from municipal to federal levels in Canada and the US to help establish dark-sky certified public lands. Trained in Technology of Participation facilitation methods, she engages community stakeholders in the protection of these areas through the regional reduction of light pollution. As a landscape architect, Lapp focuses on landscape ecology. Her research interests include how light effects the human body, the environmental effects of artificial light, and social justice issues around light pollution. Lapp holds a Bachelor of Arts in Human Ecology from World College West (1992), a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Minnesota (2001) and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Minnesota (2009).
As Committee Member:
michelle corinne liu [Architecture, Supervisor: Dr. Menna Agha; Dr, Ozayr Saloojee, Committee)]
Riotous Dis/assemblies: Fugitive Architecture, Planetary Policing + the Environmental Logics of Empire
michelle is an artist, writer and PhD student at the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University. They hold a BFA from York University (2014) and an MA in Theory and Criticism from Western University (2020). They are interested in de-professional practices, liberatory education and subversive possibilities in the minor textures of everyday life. They are inspired by abolitionist imaginaries, fugitive infrastructures, oceanic poetics, slow militancies and riotous possibilities towards collective liberation. Their work looks to architecture as a practice of radical study and seeks speculative and tactile approaches to space and politics that are often situationist, improvisatory and unfinished. Their current projects concern labour, time travel and collective practice.
Sneha Sumanth [Geography, Co-Supervisors: Dr. David Hugill and Dr. Jennifer Ridgely; Dr, Ozayr Saloojee, Committee)]
The Uneven Everyday: Locating Spatial Justice in Canadian Cities
Sneha Sumanth is a feminist urban geographer and intern architect. She is currently a PhD candidate in Geography at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Her SSHRC awarded research explores the spatialities of housing insecurity in North American cities and is situated at the intersections of political economy and everyday life. Her personal and scholarly endeavors are driven by a guiding refrain that questions how and why urban inequality is deepening in North American cities. She highlights this question by studying how realms of housing and home are increasingly occupied by a capitalist logic that values profit over human lives, and patterns geographies of home with intense racial, gendered, and class inequity. Specifically, her dissertation research is concerned with ongoing public housing renewal and redevelopment projects in Ottawa, Canada, where market-oriented ventures structurally and spatially transform the built environment of public housing and the lived experiences of marginalized tenants. She pursues her research with interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological grounding that brings together her background in architecture, urbanism and geography into a passion for spatial justice.
Reza Sohrabi [Sociology, Supervisor: Dr. Zoe Todd; Committee, Dr. Rania Tfaily, Dr. Ozayr Saloojee]
Reza Sohrabi is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at Carleton University, focusing on environmental sociology and political sociology. Prior to joining Carleton, he got two master’s degrees in Social Science-Research and Sociology from the University of Berlin and Memorial University. Using qualitative research methods, he studies a diverse range of sociological issues, including the political economy of natural resources, and social mobilization. During his doctoral studies, he aims to investigate the social, political, and economic impacts of water scarcity in the MENA region
Ozayr Saloojee 