undergraduate, graduate

coleman jordan The spatial containment, confinement, and control of African American and African Brazilian populations represent a complex trajectory from historical enslavement to contemporary challenges. This course explores the evolution of spatial...

Suzanne Blier Harvard Square has a rich history; under its earlier name of Newtowne (founded in 1630), it was once the site of the Massachusetts capital. Much has changed. This class looks back on the many changes Harvard Square has undergone, recent...

Kaja Tally-Schumacher This course investigates the myriad ways ancient Roman place-making, visual culture, and thought have been evoked, utilized, weaponized, and translated in North American thought, design, and visual history. Our investigation...

David Roxburgh The pro-seminar examines cities and monuments built in Greater Iran and Central Asia from the late 10th through early 15th centuries, spanning three principal dynastic periods (Seljuq, Mongol, and Timurid). Various functional types—mosques...

Suzanne Blier This seminar addresses questions of cultural display through the art and architecture of world fairs, mid-nineteenth century to present. Students are introduced to the seminal fair events beginning with the Crystal Palace in London, and...

Maria Gough, Vishal Khandelwal This comparative seminar examines the major role of textiles in architectural theory and practice, with a primary focus on India and Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries. Our objective is to think historically and cross...

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth This course explores the historical functions and cultural meanings of color in the period of early modernity (18th and early 19th centuries). Focusing on France and England, we will examine specifically the role color played in the...

Seth Estrin No category of object from ancient Greece has had a more outsized influence on the modern imagination than painted ceramics, especially the black- and red-figure vases produced in Archaic and Classical Athens. In antiquity, ceramic vessels...

Gulru Necipoglu Critically explores the historiography and interpretations of Islamic ornament. Themes include ornamentality and abstraction, theories of perception, orientalist discourses on the so-called "arabesque," resonances of non-figural...

Maria Gough Photomontage—the assembly of photographic fragments—is as old as photography itself. This seminar offers an episodic history of the medium, examining its use in not only the fine arts but also aristocratic photocollage albums, radical...