Heather Ecker is the Marguerite S. Hoffman and Thomas W. Lentz Curator of Islamic and Medieval Art at the Dallas Museum of Art. Previously, she was the owner and founder of Viridian Projects. Prior to that she was the Head of Curatorial Affairs at the Aga Khan Museum Project in Toronto. In 2004, she was the curator of Caliphs and Kings: The Art and Influence of Islamic Spain at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Previously, she was Curator of Islamic Art and Head of the Department of the Arts of Asia and the Islamic World at the Detroit Institute of Arts. She is a former post-doctoral fellow of the Smithsonian Institution, and of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University, New York, where she taught for two years. Heather received her PhD in Islamic Art and Archaeology from the University of Oxford in 2000, with a thesis entitled "From Masjid to Casa-Mezquita: Neighbourhood Mosques in Seville after the Castilian Conquest 1248-1634." Her work has focused mainly on Islamic Spain, and she has a keen interest in early Qur’an manuscripts, which was the focus of her fellowship at the Smithsonian. Her recent publications include: "How to administer a conquered city in al-Andalus: Mosques, Parish Churches and Parishes'" in Under the Influence: Questioning the Comparative in Medieval Castile, eds. Cynthia Robinson and Leyla Rouhi (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2004); "The Great Mosque of Cordoba in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries," Muqarnas (in press); 'Arab Stones'. Rodrigo Caro's translations of Arabic inscriptions in Seville (1634), revisited, Al-Qantara XXIII/2, 2002, pp. 347-401. With Teresa Fitzherbert, she is the co-author of ‘The Freer Canteen, Reconsidered’ (forthcoming in the Ars Orientalis journal).