Studies the interrelationship of theory, history, and practice. Looks at theory not as specialized discourse relating only to architecture, but as touching on many issues, whether they be cultural, aesthetic, philosophical, or professional. Topics and examples are chosen from a wide range of materials, from classical antiquity to today.

This research-intensive graduate seminar will pair engagement with the most recent scholarship on seventeenth-century Dutch art in its economic, environmental, and global contexts with hands-on experience in curatorial practice, ranging from training in provenance research to exhibition development to writing for museum audiences.
A primary focus of the class will be our collective investigation of the MIT Museum's significant, but little-known holdings of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings and works on paper. Together we will conceptualize a framework for how best to present these works and our findings to a 21st-century audience. The format for our public-facing work will take the form of a digital and pop-up exhibition of selected artworks combined with a public workshop or a public study day.  

The class will strike a balance between investigations of the MIT Museum’s collection at the museum’s offsite storage facility and discussions of recent interpretations of Dutch art: its visual theorizations of nature and artifice, the anxieties and pleasures of consumption in a capitalist economy, and the role of sight in ordering the world in an era of global commerce, enslavement, and colonial empire. 

The seminar will meet periodically at the MFA Boston’s Center for Netherlandish Art (CNA) together with the seminar “A World Art: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art in Global and Material Perspectives” co-taught by Professor Michael Zell, Boston University, and Dr. Christopher Atkins, the CNA’s director, where we will have further opportunities for direct exchanges with curators and the close examination of works of art.

Because of our work in the MIT Museum’s offsite storage facility and visits to study rooms and conservation labs at the MFA Boston and the Harvard Art Museums, enrollment is strictly limited to 10. 

MIT Certificate-Protected Syllabus

The city is never merely an accumulation of buildings, streets, markets, and inhabitants. It is a dense human artifact: a spatial form in which power is staged, social relations are ordered, memory is inscribed, wealth circulates, worship is organized, and difference is negotiated. Following Henri Lefebvre, the city may be understood as the most intense arena in which space is socially produced: not a neutral container, but the materialization of relations, practices, representations, and struggles.  It is also a juridical, economic, and political association, defined by market exchange, corporate life, forms of autonomy, and the institutions that regulate communal order. To Paul Wheatley, the city is a ceremonial, administrative, and symbolic center, a place where collective meaning is spatially concentrated and where society represents to itself the order of the cosmos, the polity, and the sacred.

This course examines the city from an Islamic perspective by moving beyond the modern, often essentialist notion of “the Islamic City” as a fixed urban type. Instead, it asks how pre-modern Muslim jurists, theologians, historians, geographers, philosophers, and administrators understood the city as a coherent form of legal, political, social, and moral life.  It treats the city as a paradigmatic field in which revelation, community, law, authority, worship, exchange, and memory acquired spatial form.

Legal sources will be read as theories of property, privacy, public right, roads, markets, water, waqf, nuisance, neighborhood, and Friday prayer. Theological and philosophical writings will illuminate the moral grounds of association and the ideal ordering of collective life. Geographers and historians will be approached as analysts of region, prosperity, foundation, transformation, and ruin. Ibn Khaldun’s ʿilm al-ʿumrān and al-Maqrizi’s Khitat will occupy central places as two of the most sophisticated pre-modern attempts to theorize the relation between city, state, civilization, decay, and memory.

The course moves from Medina and the early garrison towns—Kufa, Basra, Fustat, and Qayrawan—to Damascus, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Samarra, Cairo, Isfahan, Cordoba and Granada. It emphasizes hybridity, adaptation, and continuity rather than a single religious morphology. Its central argument is that Islamic urbanism generated a coherent vocabulary of urban intelligibility: jamāʿa, sulṭa, sūq, ḥisba, waqf, ḥaḍāra, ʿumrān, and kharāb. The course thus seeks a definition of the city that preserves historical diversity while recognizing conceptual integrity.

Research paper required.

Note for MArch students: Serves as an Urbanism elective

MIT Certificate-Protected Syllabus

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.