Professor Emeritus Frank Kidner Donates Syria Photographs to Harvard

HARVARD GAZETTE -- Frank Kidner was a history scholar at San Francisco State University in 1993 when he took the first of what would be four trips to Syria over the course of a decade to study ruins dating to the Roman Empire.

Kidner documented his research in more than 9,000 photographs that detail architecture, topography and the monuments themselves, focusing in particular on the Dead Cities region outside Aleppo.

“My interest in the built environment of the past had been there since childhood,” said the 78-year-old, now-retired professor, who recently donated the images to the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.