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Research Faculty Current Endeavors
8. Historiography Historiography is a central theme in the work of the HTC faculty, and sits at the core of the required methods course for graduate students in the program. Stanford Anderson has worked on the topic throughout his career, placing special emphasis on methodology and pedagogy. His first lecture and publication was a critique of the historiography of Reyner Banham. A much-cited article is his “Fiction of Function” (Assemblage 3, 1987), now in Spanish (Bitacora, Mexico City, 2008). Mark Jarzombek has published several papers on the topic of Critical Historiography as well as on the history of the architectural discipline. Caroline Jones has written on the historiographic impact on art history of Clement Greenberg; she has also investigated “The Modernist Paradigm” of Thomas Kuhn and the October group. Kristel Smentek’s central area of scholarship is the historiography of connoisseurship, with particular focus on the practices of Enlightenment print dealer and collector Pierre-Jean Mariette. Bringing to HTC considerable experience with museum work, Smentek’s research is informed by an understanding of the impact of institutions and cultural agents on the writing of history. Nasser Rabbat has written on the perception of architecture in Mamluk sources (Mamluk Studies Review, 2002), and architects in Mamluk society (JAE, 1998). He is currently working on the fifteenth-century historian al-Maqrizi for a book tentatively entitled Historicizing the City: The Significance of Maqrizi's Khitat of Cairo. Arindam Dutta is interested in the critical thrust of architectural historiography particularly in the context of theories of change articulated within different architectural manifestoes. He is also interested in comparing different historiographies as a reflection of different institutional arrangements and pedagogy in various contexts. James Wescoat is interested in the historiography of landscape research and conservation in South Asia, and particularly in the gardens and waterworks of the Mughal period. Among the various conferences that have been organized by the faculty, the conference “Architecture, Art and Cultural History” (1998) dealt directly with the question of historiography from a comparative disciplinary point of view. The HTC faculty collectively organized “Deus (e)X Historia” in 2007, inviting 18 speakers from three continents for a two-day symposium interrogating the vexed relationship between religious accounts of the past and the positivist thrust of scientific history-writing.
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