This seminar examines the relationship between political ecology, ecological crises, and the process of (de)colonization. Students will critically analyze historical understandings of decolonization and contemporary proposals for decolonial ecologies. Following Stefanie K. Dunning’s invocation “May our egos die so that the world may live,” this seminar asks, how can we continually transform our praxis on a personal and structural level to create the possibility and space for decolonial ecologies? And whose imaginations are presently shaping our collective futures? Open for cross-registration. And open to undergraduates with instructor’s permission.

This seminar deals with how artists, archivists, architects, and historians have faced the myriad archive fevers and archival turns of the 20th and 21st centuries. This period has seen a marked shift between archives being used as ‘source’ to becoming a ‘subject’ of critical inquiry. However, these questions are not limited to the past few centuries. Rather, the philosophical questions of history and its relationship with the archive spans millennia from Assyrian clay tablets and Shang dynasty oracle bones to later examples of city- or trade-based archives in Florence and the post-revolutionary foundation of the French national archives. Critical scholarship asks which ‘rules of classification, rules of framing and rules of practice’ determine the contents of an archive and enable ‘knowledge’ to be recognized (Tuhiwai Smith, 2021). And these questions are motivated by an argument that political power is inextricably linked with who can create, access, participate in, and interpret the archive and by extension, an institutionalized collective memory (Derrida, 1995). In Milan Kundera’s words, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” This course thus interrogates how “the architect and the archive are inseparable” and how the archivist and the historian are entangled to attend to the contested memories and denied histories embodied within buildings, cultural institutions, and architectures (Wigley, 1995).

Through visits and hands-on research in archives, students will develop a critical methodology that can be applied to their own research and practice. Students will learn to interpret and triangulate primary sources, such as texts, films, maps, drawings, manuscripts, correspondence, government documents, photographs, illustrations, and archive-based artworks. Weekly readings will cover concepts like the origins of the archive, architectural legacy, archives as spatial structures, projects to expand the canon, restitution, the art of crafting archives, the digital turn, parafictional archives, and the archives of critical theory.

Required for doctoral students in HTC as a prerequisite for work on the doctoral dissertation. Prior to candidacy, doctoral students are required to write and orally defend a proposal laying out the scope of their thesis, its significance, a survey of existing research and literature, the methods of research to be adopted, a bibliography and plan of work. Work is done in consultation with HTC Faculty, in accordance with the HTC PhD Degree Program guidelines.

Required of doctoral students in HTC as a prerequisite for work on the doctoral dissertation. The Minor Exam focuses on a specific area of specialization through which the student might develop their particular zone of expertise. Work is done in consultation with HTC faculty, in accordance with the HTC PhD Degree Program Guidelines.

Required of doctoral students in HTC as a prerequisite for work on the doctoral dissertation. The Major Exam covers a historically broad area of interest and includes components of history, historiography, and theory. Preparation for the exam will focus on four or five themes agreed upon in advance by the student and the examiner, and are defined by their area of teaching interest. Work is done in consultation with HTC faculty, in accordance with the HTC PhD Degree Program Guidelines.

Studies theoretical and historiographical works pertaining to the fields of art and architectural history. Members of seminar pursue work designed to examine their own presuppositions and methods.

Seminar on a selected topic in critical theory. Requires original research and presentation of oral and written report.

Seminar on the politics of representation with special focus on Orientalist traditions in architecture, art, literature, and scholarship. Critically analyzes pivotal texts, projects, and artworks that reflect the encounters between the West and the Orient from Antiquity to the present. Discusses how political, ideological, and religious attitudes inform the construction and reproduction of Western knowledge about the Islamic world. Research paper required. Open to qualified undergraduates. 

Examines the history of Islamic architecture spanning fifteen centuries on three continents – Asia, Africa, Europe. Students study representative examples from the 7th century House of the Prophet to the current high-rises of Dubai, in conjunction with their religious, urban, social, political, and intellectual environments. Crosscultural exchanges are highlighted from late Antique Arabia down to the interaction with the West in the age of colonialism and the consequent revival of Islamic architecture today.