Oleg Grabar (November 3, 1929 – January 8, 2011) was a French-bornart historian andarcheologist, who spent most of his career in the United States, as a leading figure in the field ofIslamic art andarchitecture in the Western academe.^[1]

Oleg Grabar was the son ofAndré Grabar. He attended theUniversity of Paris, where he studied ancient, medieval, and modern history, before moving to the US in 1948.^[2] He completed degrees from bothHarvard and theUniversity of Paris in 1950. In 1955, he obtained aPhD fromPrinceton University.

He served on the faculty of theUniversity of Michigan in 1954–69, before moving toHarvard University as a full professor. In 1980, Grabar became Harvard's firstAga Khan Professor ofIslamic art andarchitecture. He was a founding editor of thejournalMuqarnas in 1983.^[3] He became emeritus from Harvard in 1990, and then joined the School of Historical Studies at theInstitute for Advanced Study, becoming emeritus there in 1998.

According to the President of the Historians of Islamic Art Association, "Grabar transformed the fields of Islamic art, architecture and archaeology through his myriad scholarly works, general textbooks, and through training and inspiring many generations of undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Michigan and at Harvard."^[4]

Grabar's archeological and scholarly research covered a wide range ofIslamic studies across Africa, the Middle East, and Muslim Asia.^[3][5]

Early in his career, Grabar spent two years (1953 and 1960–1961) at theAmerican School of Oriental Research inJordanian-ruled East Jerusalem.^[3] From 1964 to 1972, he directed excavations on a Medieval Islamic town atQasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi,Syria, work later described in a two-volume book he coauthored,City in the Desert, Qasr al-Hayr East.^[4] Other major books in English includeThe Shape of the Holy (Princeton, 1996),The Mediation of Ornament (Princeton, 1992),The Great Mosque of Isfahan (NYU, 1990), andThe Formation of Islamic Art (Yale, 1973).

Oleg Grabar also did scholarly work on thePersian miniature. With Sheila Blair, he coauthored an illustrated study of a majorShahnameh manuscript,Epic Images and Contemporary History: The Illustrations of the Great Mongol Shahnama (Chicago, 1980). He was also a noted scholar of theDome of the Rock, after the appearance of his article "The Umayyad Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem."^[6] His workPenser l'art islamique : une esthétique de l'ornement denotes also reflections on the nature of Islamic art.

Grabar was the son of the renowned ByzantinistAndré Grabar.^[2] Oleg Grabar and his wife Terry, a retired English professor, were married for 59 years. They had two children, Nicolas and Anne Louise, and three grandchildren, Henry, Olivia, and Margaret.^[4]

Grabar received many honors during his lifetime, including theCharles Lang Freer Medal in 2001 and, in 2010, the Chairman's Award at theAga Khan Award for Architecture ceremony inDoha, where he made what was perhaps his last public speech.^[7][8] He was a member of both theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences and theAmerican Philosophical Society.^[9][10]

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Oleg Grabar,OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 200+ works in 500+ publications in 13 languages and 15,000+ library holdings.^[11]

• City in the Desert with Renata Holod, James Knustad, and William Trousdale,Harvard University Press, (1978)
• Epic Images and Contemporary History: The Illustrations of the Great Mongol Shahnama (1982)
• The Mediation of Ornament (1992)
• The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem
• Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Post-Classical World, withGlen Bowersock andPeter Brown,Harvard University Press, (1999)
• The Art and Architecture of Islam 650–1250, withRichard Ettinghausen and Marilyn Jenkins-Madina,Yale History of Art, (2001)
• Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World edited with G. W. Bowersock, Peter Brown,Harvard University Press, (2001)
• Mostly Miniatures (2002)
• "Islamic visual culture, 1100–1800", Ashgate, (2006)
• The Dome of the Rock,Harvard University Press, (2006)
• "The Haram Al-Sharif: An Essay in Interpretation," BRIIFS vol. 2 no 2 (Autumn 2000).
• Constructing the Study of Islamic Art, 83 collected articles (4 vols, 2005–06)

• Excavations at the Temple Mount
• Where Heaven and Earth Meet: Jerusalem's Sacred Esplanade

• Dictionary of Art Historians: Oleg Grabar
• Oleg Grabar's page at the Institute for Advanced Study Link broken, September, 2017
• Oleg Grabar papers, 1898-2009 at the Getty Research Institute