Silvia Naef is a full professor at the Arabic Studies Section, University of Geneva. She has taught in Tübingen and Basel and has been a visiting professor at the universities of Toronto (2007-2009), Sassari (Italy, 2012), the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris (2016), St. Joseph, Beirut (2017) and a visiting researcher in Princeton (2003) and Göttingen (2013). Her research focusses on modern art, visual representations and images in the Arab and Islamic world; she is also interested in gender issues. She has recently co-edited Visual Modernity in the Arab World, Turkey and Iran: Reintroducing the ‘Missing Modern’, in Asiatische Studien/Etudes Asiatiques (2016). She has been the principal investigator of the research project Other Modernities: Patrimony and Practices of Visual Expression Outside the West (2013-2017), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, in collaboration with I. Maffi (University of Lausanne) and W. Shaw (Free University Berlin).

She moderated the Fellow Colloquium at Darat al Funun in 2018, and wrote an essay in Knowledge Production: Examining Arab Art Today.