George T. Scanlon *59

George Scanlon, noted professor emeritus in the department of Arab and Islamic civilization at the American University in Cairo (AUC), died July 13, 2014. He was 88.

Scanlon earned a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore in 1950. He had served in the Navy from 1943 to 1945, and then in the Naval Reserve from 1951 to 1953. He earned master’s and doctorate degrees in 1957 and 1959, respectively, in Oriental languages and literature from Princeton. From 1957 to 1958, he was a Fulbright research fellow at AUC.

Thereafter, his academic affiliations included the University of Chicago, Berkeley, Harvard, Michigan, and Oxford. He returned to AUC in 1974 as a visiting professor of Islamic art and architecture and became tenured in 1975. He taught until he retired in 2011 at age 85.

A pillar of his department and AUC, Scanlon saw his students go on to successful careers worldwide. While he made contributions in his field of Islamic art and architecture, Scanlon is mainly remembered as the principal excavator (with W.B. Kubiak) of the archaeological site at Al-Fustat, the earliest Arab city-settlement in Egypt.

Scanlon was the first non-Egyptian to work in Islamic archaeology in Egypt. In 1998, he was the first recipient of the Middle East Medievalists Lifetime Achievement Award.

Graduate memorials are prepared by the APGA.