Nasser Rabbat is an authority on medieval Islamic Architecture with particular emphasis on the relationship between urban culture and architectural form. His most recent book on the subject was The Citadel of Cairo: A New Interpretation of Royal Mamluk Architecture. He also published several essays on Umayyad architecture (7th-8th century) and Mamluk architecture and urbanism (13th-15th century), the last of which is "The Dialogic Dimension in Umayyad Art," RES 43 (Spring 2003). In 2003, he was invited to give a series of lectures at the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA) in Paris on the subject of word and image as the dual impulse in early Islamic architecture. He is currently completing a project on the fifteenth-century historian Taqqi al-Din al-Maqrizi who, in his prodigious book al-Khitat (1415-40), was the first to produce a true urban history of a city, Cairo in this case. He has already published three scholarly articles on the subject in Annales Islamologiques, Mamluk Studies Review, and the Cairo Heritage.

Lauren Jacobi’s primary specialization is in late medieval and Renaissance architectural history with a focus on Italy and connections that span the Mediterranean. She has published on the spatial network of banks in sixteenth century Rome as well as on early seventeenth century papal medals. Her current book project is a cultural history that traces how urban form, spatial practices, and monetary trade interlocked in and beyond Italy from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries. One of her recent graduate seminars was “Locating Capitalism: Producing Early Modern Cities and Objects.” She holds a 2015-16 post-doctoral fellowship in Early Modern Studies at the American Academy in Rome. With a strong background in art history, Lauren investigates a wide range of late medieval and early modern objects in her research and teaching.

Kristel Smentek is a scholar of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, with particular interests in the art market and collecting practices and their roles in structuring the reception of art and the construction of its histories. Her research and publications have focused on the eighteenth-century print market, the impact of empiricist epistemology on the display and preservation of artworks, the interrelationship of natural history and rococo design, and the cross-cultural dimensions of European art and collecting. See her book Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe where much of this research is published.

Mark Jarzombek, who published On Leon Battista Alberti: His Literary and Aesthetic Theories (1989), continues to work on the topic of Renaissance architectural theory with in A Global History of Architecture, 2007, 2nd ed. 2011, co-authored with Vikram Prakash and Frank Ching.

David Friedman is an historian of early modern urbanism and architecture. Emeritus in HTC, he taught seminars and courses on European cities and Renaissance architecture. His major publication is the book Florentine New Towns, Urban Design in the Late Middle Ages, which won the Hitchcock prize of the Society of Architectural History. He is currently working on the impact of mapping and survey technologies on urban design. In 2003-2004, he was the resident in Medieval Studies at the American Academy in Rome and in 2006 he was a fellow at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology. A first synthesis of his research on urban surveys was published in the Renaissance volume of the History of Cartography (2008). Other articles on the subject include "Fiorenza: Geography and Representation in a Fifteenth Century City View" in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte (2001) and "Urban Design Without Drawing" in the acts of the conference Arnolfo's Moment , i Tatti, Florence, 2009.

Former faculty member Erika Naginski edited a special volume of Thresholds (2004) entitled "Concerto Barocco," which was dedicated to emeritus Baroque scholar Henry Millon; the roster of contributors included graduate students in the HTC program as well as HTC alums Hilary Ballon and Christy Anderson.

The interdisciplinary nature of HTC connects students and faculty with colleagues throughout the Institute on the subject of art, technology, and science; Caroline A Jones is directly involved with these exchanges. A centerpiece of Jones' work is the study of cultural and social connections between art and science. Technology and industry, as the "footprints" of science in daily life, are the focus of her work on Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Robert Smithson, and others in her book Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, (1996/8) which received the Charles Eldredge Prize from the Smithsonian Institution. These interests also motivated individual essays on Francis Picabia, studio/laboratory/factory, and the impact of engineering structures and technological theory on artistic practice, as well as curatorial projects (such as Painting Machines and the award-winning Sensorium and Hans Haake exhibitions for the List Visual Arts Center) and her co-edited volume with Peter Galison, Picturing Science, Producing Art (1998). Jones also participated in a Video Art show at the List, where her essay "Video Trajectories" was published in 2007. A conference organized by Jones in 2014 featured neuroscientists, artists and other specialists focusing on modalities of sensory experience; this work supported by MIT's Center for Art, Science, and Technology will be featured in the co-edited volume "Experience: Culture, Cognition, and the Common Sense (MIT Press, 2015). One of the co-editors is HTC alum and CAST post-doctoral fellow, Rebecca Uchill

Kristel Smentek's work on Enlightenment collectors includes research and scholarship into the scientific "mysteries" of hard-paste porcelain production in European workshops and the development of color printmaking technologies; she has also examined issues of perception in the 18th century.

Emeritus Faculty David Friedman pursues his research into in Renaissance urbanism with a special focus on the technology of design: measurement, surveying, drawing, setting out. Friedman's 2006 project for the Dibner Instute was the examination of incunabula on survey, military architecture, and other other subjects that included technical illustration.

Mark Jarzombek's interest in the intersection of architectural practice with science include an article "Money, Molecules, and Design" (Thresholds 18, Spring 1999) that reflects his ongoing interest in the science and rhetoric of "sustainable design."

Arindam Dutta has taught graduate seminars on the body and the machine in modern and postmodern culture and continues to be interested in theories of the cyborg (see Gender/Feminism); he developed with Caroline Jones, an elective course Technopolitics, which continue to interrogate systems of technoscience as they interfere with art and architecture. Dutta, along with HTC faculty and alumna/i, produced an important history of this interface in A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the ‘Techno-Social’ Moment. The collective Aggregate, which Dutta and Hyde helped found maintains an active publishing program on these subjects.

Much of Emeritus Professor Stanford Anderson's thought and work stems from an introduction by Paul Feyerabend to the thought of Karl Popper and Anderson's later associations with philosopher of science Imre Lakatos. Anderson's studies of the work of Uruguayan design-build engineer Eladio Dieste further explore the relations of engineering and architecture (Princeton Architectural Press, 2004).

Timothy Hyde has investigated many dimensions of the postwar period and the evolution of international architectural discourse during this period. His book Constitutional Modernism: Architecture and Civil Society in Cuba 1933-59 explains how a project of national formation extend from the 1930s into the increasingly international and interdisciplinary settings of the postwar period. His current research includes explorations of the emergence of postmodernism in Great Britain as a consequence of political and economic realignments.

Caroline A Jones has written extensively on the subject of postmodern art and studio practices (as in Machine in the Studio). Her 2005 book on art writer Clement Greenberg examines his impact on postwar art, and the generation of postmodern opposition to this controversial figure. Jones also organized several monographic, survey, and/or site-specific exhibitions on postwar artists such as Frank Stella, Richard Diebenkorn, Sol LeWitt, Walter De Maria, the Bay Area Figurative group, Hans Haake, and others; these have been shown in a range of museums from the US to Japan. Her current research into biennial culture and globalism carries on a project completed for UNESCO on Nationalism and Internationalism in Modern Art (2008), and will be published as The Global Work of Art in 2016.

Mark Jarzombek has engaged the question of Postmodernism in an article on Robert Stern and in his book entitled the Psychologizing of Modernity: Art, Architecture, and History (2000). He has also edited a volume on American corporate architecture after 1945 for the Journal of Architectural Education (54/1 November 2000). He continues to work on topics relating to post-WWII rebuilding in Germany expanding on his previously published work "Urban Heterology: Dresden and the Dialectics of Post-Traumatic History" in Studies in Theoretical and Applied Aesthetics (2001).

In Spring 2003, Jones and Jarzombek offered a seminar probing the disciplinary issues between postmodern art and architecture, concluding with the problems posed by the current "post-critical" condition. Stanford Anderson studies post-war architectural modernism, as in the work of Aalto, Kahn, and Dieste. He taught subjects on architecture and criticism since 1960.

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. Emeritus faculty 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). A long engaged topic appears in “Quasi-autonomy in Architecture (Perspecta 33, 2002). Mark Jarzombek has published several papers on the topic of Critical Historiography as well as on the history of the architectural discipline.

Caroline A 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 a book tentatively entitled "Historicizing the City: Al-Maqrizi and his Cairo Khitat" on fifteenth century Mamluk historiography. 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 works on the historiography of landscape research and conservation in South Asia, and particularly in the gardens and waterworks of the Mughal period.

Timothy Hyde frequently presents research on the historiography of modern architecture at international conferences, including the 2013 meeting of the European Architectural History Network (EAHN) in Sao Paolo, and the conference Once Upon a Time, held at the ETH in 2015. His essay “Notes on Architectural Persons” proposes a renovation of the convention of personality and personification within the practice of architectural history. Hyde’s seminar course on the “Histories of the Future” also raises questions of historiography by inquiring into the relation between historical understanding of time and temporality, and the possible actions of design that can be undertaken through those understandings.

With an interest in the historiography of capitalism and discourses about it, Lauren Jacobi’s current book project examines how figures including Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Georg Simmel considered the preindustrial economy and monetary trade. At the Austin, Texas meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in 2014, she gave a talk on the historiography of literature concerning public space and definitions of modernity. She also has a forthcoming publication that explores how theorists and historians connected to the Annales School located the starting point of world history in the sixteenth century.

Among the various conferences that have been organized by the faculty, several dealt directly with the question of historiography from a comparative disciplinary point of view, such as "Architecture, Art and Cultural History" (1998), "Deus (e)X Historia" in 2007, which invited 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. Several smaller conferences included "Deeper History" (2013), offering specific inquiries into the writing of Western and non-Western architectural histories, and "Revisiting CASE" (2015) which examined the theoretical underpinning of a new historigraphy fostered by Stanford Anderson and others beginning in the 1960s.

The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture actively collaborates with the school's urbanists and landscape architects in the City Design and Development group and the new Center for Architecture and Urbanism. James Wescoat offers seminars in HTC on Indo-Islamic landscapes, landscape heritage conservation, and historical-geographic inquiry.

Timothy Hyde’s book Constitutional Modernism: Architecture and Civil Society in Cuba 1933-59provides a detailed accounting of the emergence of the modern discipline of urban planning, and the corresponding distinctive conceptions of the city produced by architecture, planning, urban design, and landscape architecture.

A portion of Arindam Dutta's next book, Ancestralities, compares the garden designs of the British and American landowning class and the zamindari class in Bengal of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Critical here is the role of landscape as a form of socialization under different governmental regimes, for instance in the transition from the ancien regimes of Europe and Mughal feudal arrangements in India, to a new fiscal dynamics driven by the Bank of England in the eighteenth century. His article, "Computing Alibis: Third World Teratologies" in Perspecta 40 (2008) reflects on what the "city" might actually mean when construed as a term for intervention by certain epistemological paradigms or as fashioned by so-called "experts" as architects, urban planners and computer programmers.

The concept of "The Islamic City" is one of the main research interests of Nasser Rabbat, who regularly teaches a graduate seminar on the topic. He has several essays on various cities in the Islamic world in his book Thaqafat al Bina' wa Bina' al-Thaqafa (The Culture of Building and Building Culture) (Beirut, 2002).

Lauren Jacobi maintains an active research interest in urban history. Her current book project examines the location and spatial infrastructure of late medieval and Renaissance monetary trade, which was fundamental to urban development. With Professor Rafi Segal, she routinely teaches “The Making of Cities,” a course that studies a series of forces (geographic/ecological, political/military, and technological/material ones, for example) as a causal superstructure and frame for understanding the history of urban form and urbanization.

Mark Jarzombek has been working on the post-war rebuildings of Dresden. A version of his work on the topic was published by the journal Studies in Theoretical and Applied Aesthetics (Spring 2001), titled, "Urban Heterology and the Dialectics of Post-Traumatic History."

Caroline A Jones' book "The Global Work of Art" investigates the complex relationship between the urbanism of world fairs and biennials in relation to modern and contemporary art.

Emeritus Professor David Friedman's research and teaching focus on Italian city planning from the 13th- through the 15th-centuries. He taught seminars on reflections of the ancient city in European urban design and on the application of geometric survey to design. Florentine New Towns began a research program that explores the relationship between society and the city. His most recent works examine the role of architecture in the development of the urban landscape. "La Piazza di San Giovanni" published in the acts a conference that he organized with the title "Le terre nuove" (2004) looks at the transformation of a city square by its evolving functions and its architectural development. "The Florentine Mercanzia and it Palace" with Antonella Astorri (i Tatti Studies, 2005) represents a collaboration aimed at the integration of institutional and architectural history.

Emeritus Professor Stanford Anderson co-directed a research program on streets at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, under a grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. One result of the program was his book, On Streets (1978). Anderson wrote the entry on Urban Morphology for the Dizionario dell'architettura del XX Secolo (Turin 2004).

HTC research trips, such as Havana in 2013, and Uzbek and Peru in 2015, often take the topic of preservation as a core problem to be addressed.

Nasser Rabbat has published three essays critiquing the preservation projects in three Arabic cities: Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut. In 1999, he led a group of 15 MIT students on a trip to evaluate and report on various restoration and conservation projects in Cairo. AS a participant in the Aga Khan's international activities, he is involved with preservation from a global perspective.

Kristel Smentek's work on Pierre-Jean Mariette involves detailed conservation analysis of the drawings preserved in Mariette's important historical collection. Smentek's study of Enlightenment efforts at preservation include her research into what might, in modern terms, be understood as mutilation of original material.

James Wescoat has been involved as a consultant on various significant preservation research projects in India and Pakistan, including the Smithsonian Mughal Gardens project, the gardens of the Taj Mahal, the World Heritage Site of Champaner-Parvgadh in Gujarat and the Nagaur Rajputpalace-garden complex in Rajasthan.

Hélène Lipstadt, who has over the years held a visiting appointment at HTC, plays an important role in DOCOMOMO, and organized a session at a recent SAH Annual Meeting titled "Basic Bourdieu: architecture as a field of cultural production." Visitors to the HTC and AKPIA programs have often focused on preservation debates, as in the seminars taught by Nebahat Avcioglu ("City as Palimpsest: The Islamic City from the Pre-modern to Post-modern") and Jorge Otero-Pailos (Spring 2009).

HTC faculty explore comparative views of the arts and architectures of different cultures and contexts. The section is ideally suited for such an endeavor; with some exceptions, faculty interests and research cover significant regions of the globe.

Mark Jarzombek is co-author with Vikramaditya Prakash and Francis D. K. Ching at the University of Washington in Seattle, of the textbook: A Global History of Architecture (Wiley & Sons 2006).

Arindam Dutta's 2007 The Bureaucracy of Beauty lays out the methodological parameters for such comparative study; he has in the past given seminars and lecture courses on the subject. More recently, on the basis of the arguments in Bureaucracy, he was commissioned to lecture in Ireland on Irish art in the early twentieth century in its nationalist period. Dutta's current project, Ancestralities: Nature, Architecture and the Debt, draws from archival sources in seven different countries: Britain, the United States, India, France, Algeria, Bangladesh and Australia. Together Dutta and Jarzombek organized the conference "Architecture – History – Pedagogy" in 2003 and publish frequently on this topic.

Emeritus faculty Stanford Anderson is involved in continuing work with both the design and history faculty of Tongji University in Shanghai, and pursues research into modernism in the Latin American context.

Research by faculty and doctoral candidates in the Aga Khan Program have extended from Venice to India. James Wescoat is interested in comparative theory and method in landscape research, and has published on long-term flows of ideas and technologies of water management between the U.S. and South Asia. Caroline A Jones' continuing interest in art and critical practices in Latin America, Europe, Asia and elsewhere will come into focus in her book "The Global Work of Art." And the current work of Kristel Smentek examines cross-cultural encounters during the Enlightenment particularly focused on the reception of Asian Art in eighteenth century Europe.