Graduate Courses Fall 2026

AFST 8839 (10434) / HIST 8320

Environmental History of Africa

Robert Harms

W 9:25-11:20am

An examination of the interaction between people and their environment in Africa and the ways in which this interaction has affected or shaped the course of African history.

 

ANTH 5331 (12354) / CLSS 7000 / EALL 7730 / HIST 6000 / HSAR 6564 / JDST 6553 / NELC 5330 / RLST 8030

Archaia Seminar: Art, Architecture, and Climate Change in the Premodern World

Avary Taylor

M 9:25am-11:10am

This seminar explores artistic, architectural, an\d material responses to environmental transformations, such as floods, droughts, volcanic events, and periods of exceptional abundance, across the premodern world. Foregrounding the indivisibility of natural worlds and human creativity, we examine how ancient peoples conceived of, and responded to, the disruptions and affordances of their environment. Through a comparative framework that puts cultures across the ancient world into conversation—from Mesopotamia to Mesoamerica and beyond—we trace the entanglements of art, politics, and climate, asking: how, if at all, did environmental change materialize in the things people made? This course serves as an Archaia Core Seminar. It is connected with Archaia’s Ancient Societies Workshop (ASW), which runs a series of events throughout the academic year related to the theme of the seminar. Students enrolled in the seminar must attend all ASW events during the semester in which the seminar is offered.

 

 

ANTH 8897 (10421) / HIST 5804 / HSAR 6841 / HSHM 7691

Topics in the Environmental Humanities

Paul Sabin

T 11:30am-1:20pm

This is the required workshop for the Graduate Certificate in Environmental Humanities. The workshop meets six times per term to explore concepts, methods, and pedagogy in the environmental humanities, and to share student and faculty research. Each student pursuing the Graduate Certificate in Environmental Humanities must complete both a fall term and a spring term of the workshop, but the two terms of student participation need not be consecutive. The fall term each year emphasizes key concepts and major intellectual currents. The spring term each year emphasizes pedagogy, methods, and public practice. Specific topics vary each year. Students who have previously enrolled in the course may audit the course in a subsequent year. This course does not count toward the coursework requirement in history. Open only to students pursuing the Graduate Certificate in Environmental Humanities.

 

ARCH 5103 (13069

Cartographies of Climate Change

Joyce Hsiang 

W 9:20am-11:15am

Climate change disproportionately affects the people and places with the least power and resources. As our sea levels have risen, so too has the extreme socioeconomic disparity of specific communities and countries, creating a drowning class of climate refugees. Entire countries on the front lines of sea-level rise face the specter of nationhood without territory, despite the undeniable fact that their contribution to this global problem is negligible. And if climate change is in fact “the result of human activity since the mid-20th century,” it is in actuality a largely male-made phenomenon, if we unpack the gender dynamics and underlying power structures of the proto-G8 nations, the self-proclaimed leaders of industrialization. These power dynamics become even further exacerbated as we consider the implications of the particularly American interest in doubling down on investing in the heaviest piece of infrastructure ever—climate engineering. The architectural community appears to be in agreement. Climate change is a fundamental design problem. And yet calls to action have been ineffectual, responses underwhelming in the face of this overwhelming challenge. As the architectural community is eagerly poised to jump on the design bandwagon, this course seeks to reveal, foreground, empower, and give physical form to the spatial dimensions and power dynamics of the people and places most impacted by climate change. More broadly, the course aspires to help students develop their own critical stance on climate change and the role architects play.

 

ARCH 5109 (13036)

Ink

Michelle Fornabai

F 1:30pm-3:25pm

Ink proposes a creative and critical inquiry into ink’s instrumentality in architecture to delineate a subtle story—a latent history of architecture in ink—placing ink in our world with the purpose of gaining knowledge within and for the architectural discipline. A close consideration of the varied conceptual and material aspects of ink acts as a medium to reflect upon the means by which architectural knowledge is generated, articulated, and applied. Course Structure The course will be structured by the abecedary, ink or “V is for Vermilion as described by Vitruvius” An A to Z of Ink in Architecture. Composed from various material forms of ink found in studio, an alphabet in 26 images was created and sent as an invitation to 26+ architects, artists, historians, theorists, scholars, inventors and poets to write a brief entry on a discrete ink object. On the first day of class, 13 of the 26 letters will be selected at random and a single letter assigned to each week of the course. Each week, the class will closely examine the ink objects described by diverse voices in the entries written under the assigned letter— conceptually and materially—by reading, in discussion and in drawings. Reading: Each entry describing a discrete ink object is typically brief—generally 500 to 1000 words; the 26 letters contain between 1-5 entries each on average. Weekly reading will be assigned by letter to be discussed in class. Discussion: Each week the class will discuss the ink entries under a single letter to create collective word images. Drawing (in-class/in-studio): Students will spend time each class period using drawing to explore material and conceptual aspects of the ink objects. [These drawings may provide material for the weekly out-of-class assignments. Students will keep a folio of A3 loose-leaf sheets that can be pinned up and compiled for reference and review. In addition, there may be collective in-class drawings, done on larger paper that will be in response to discussion in class. They will be due at the end of the class period. Supplemental ink materials may be provided by the instructor.] Drawing (out-of-class assignments): Students will construct an architectural drawing(s) each week for the letter discussed in class, due at the beginning of the next class (for pin-up/discussion). [Students will determine four parameters for each architectural drawing: scale (ie. measured drawing), view (ie. projection: parallel, oblique, orthographic, isometric, perspective), set (format), and sequence. These architectural drawings may be manual and/or digital. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, a container formed of ink that contains ink, will form the basis of these drawings.] Pin-ups: Weekly drawing assignments will be reviewed weekly. Before each week’s discussion, you should pin-up with the rest of your studio group to facilitate an efficient discussion. Reviews: For Mid review, architectural drawing of a single entry from ink by the student’s choice (not covered in the 13 assigned letters) will be constructed. For Final review, students may delineate a new entry for the abecedary, ink. Mid and Final reviews will include outside critics. Evaluation: Each drawing assignment will be evaluated for a) technique and b) completion. After each pin-up and during the in-class exercise the professor will give an evaluation that will then be recorded by the TF. If a drawing needs improvement to satisfactorily meet the requirements of the assignment, the student will be asked to make these improvements for re-evaluation. All assignments must meet this standard to successfully pass the course. Course Requirements Attendance at all class sessions is mandatory, in accordance with YSoA policy. More than two unexcused absences constitute failure of the class. Out-of-class drawing assignments must be completed by 6pm on the Thursday before the date they are reviewed. Drawings are to be saved for comprehensive review at the end of the term and submitted digitally as directed by the Teaching Fellow.

 

ARCH 5112 (13066)

Space-Time-Form

Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen

W 1:30pm-3:25pm

This seminar explores key concepts, techniques, and media that have affected the design, discussion, and representation of architecture in the twentieth century. The seminar aims to develop a particular type of disciplinary knowledge by crossing experience and act with historical and theoretical engagement. The class foregrounds reciprocity of practice and context, believing the exchange provides an invaluable tool for understanding the origin of ideas and thereby capitalizing on their full potential. Each class is organized around a single concept (form, structure, space, time); technique (drawing, material, color); or media (typography, photography, weaving). Sessions require both a visual/material exercise and close reading of seminal texts. Particular attention is paid to working with different tools and techniques, registering, observing, and analyzing formal and material techniques and effects. Limited enrollment.

 

ARCH 5114 (13123)

The Plan

Brennan Buck

Th 9:20am-11:15am

The architectural plan is an index of architectural values. It expresses the underlying ethics and ideologies of the architecture; evinces the background environment of building technologies, rules, regulations, conventions, and customs; and traces the power relations that buildings enact. This course sketches the history of plan-making during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Beaux Arts composition to modern “non -composition,” before focusing on the scattershot discourse about the plan today. Rather than positing a single grand thesis about the contemporary plan, the course foregrounds the countless threads of plan making evident today and asks students to identify the underlying ideas, histories, and implications of specific plans.

 

ARCH 5116 (13124)

Ruins, Ruination, and Reuse

Mark Gage

F 9:20am-11:15am

Architectural ruination indexes not only the failure of individual buildings but also of technologies, economies, communities, or, at times, entire civilizations. And yet architecture is rarely discussed in these terms—as a framework of human reality that itself can be damaged or destroyed, thereby producing significant effects on individuals, communities, and nations. This course engages in the study of various forms of ruination from not only the past and present but also the future, through research into the speculative territories of online “ruin porn,” new genres of art practice, and in particular dystopian television and film projects that reveal an intense contemporary interest in apocalyptic themes. The concept of ruination also be used as a philosophical tool to study architecture at its most essential qualities through speculating on where it can be made to fail—and yet still maintain its identity. For instance, would Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoy remain iconic had its piloti been replaced with thin bronze metal Doric columns? Or giant garden gnomes? Students, accordingly, “ruin” architectural icons through visual design interventions. Tutorials are offered on professional matte-painting Photoshop techniques that allow students to produce such visual arguments. The goal of the course is not to convey to the students an existing body of architectural knowledge but to unearth a new architectural discourse that considers architecture in reverse—emphasizing its destruction and decay rather than its creation in an effort to reveal new territories of architectural impact.

 

ARCH 6102 (13126) 

Building Disasters: When Things Go Wrong

John Jacobson

W 1:30pm-3:25pm

Building Disasters: When Things Go Wrong This seminar flips the traditional approach to architectural education by focusing not on celebrated successes, but on failures – spectacular, sobering, and instructive. Through detailed case studies of structural and architectural disasters, the course examines how miscalculations, human error, design flaws, mismanagement, and unforeseen conditions can lead to catastrophic outcomes. More than a technical postmortem, these failures are also considered within their broader political, cultural, environmental, and professional contexts. What went wrong? Why did it happen? What were the consequences—not just for the buildings themselves, but for the people who used, built, and designed them? The course also looks at how these failures have prompted changes in building codes, engineering standards, professional ethics, and architectural practice. By studying what did not work, students gain critical insight into what it means to build responsibly, learning to anticipate risk, question assumptions, and navigate the complex realities of the practice of architecture. Each student selects a building failure to research and presents their findings in class. Through this process, the course aims to develop more thoughtful, critical, and ethically grounded designers – aware not only of how things are built, but of how things can go wrong.

 

ARCH 7001 (10068)

Architecture and Modernity

David Sadighian

T 9:20am-11:15am

This survey lecture course considers how theory activates new ways of making and imagining the built environment. Each week highlights a topic of architectural theory (e.g., Form, Site) and maps its development across historical periods, geographies, and fields of knowledge. Complementing the main lectures are presentations of recent projects by design faculty from the Yale School of Architecture and beyond. By challenging the familiar binary of theory versus practice, the course explores the past, present, and future limits of architectural knowledge. Moreover, by emphasizing the activating properties of theory, we speculate on how the discipline’s tool kit of ideas and practices might engage the urgent crises of our contemporary world.

 

ARCH 7104 (13129)

Capital Building: Histories of Design and Accumulation

David Sadighian

Th 9:20am-11:15am

How has design shaped the rise of global capitalism, ca. 1700 to present? Surveying a wide range of buildings, objects, infrastructures, and landscapes across the Atlantic World, our aim is to understand how the built environment evolved to guide practices of capital accumulation—from the plantations of the early modern Caribbean to the “supertalls” of Billionaires’ Row. Readings draw from a growing body of scholarly literature that approaches design as an agent of political economy as opposed to a reflection of pre-existing ideas and economic structures. The seminar’s case studies therefore emphasize the reciprocity between themes of architectural and capitalist modernity (e.g., Circulation, Development) as well as the spatial forms and extractive processes that accompany them. Coursework results in new critical perspectives for the historical study of present-day spatial inequality. Moreover, moving beyond familiar narratives and geographies of modernity, we consider design’s relation to not only the production of wealth but also counter-models of local autonomy, mutual aid, and redistribution.

 

ARCH 7105 (13130)

The Automatic Promise: Architecture’s Computer Dismembered

Francesca Hughes

F 9:20am-11:15am

If we are to rethink architecture now, as we must, we need also to rethink its relations to computation. In homage to Tony Vidler’s “Architecture Dismembered”, this seminar examines the historic, and now uncanny, doubling of architecture with not the body but with the long and inevitable project of computation, itself ironically a project to de-corporealize thought and render it automatic. In the sessions we consider the ideations of architecture and computation as ever-entangled, if not co-constitutive, arguing, tout court, that without architectural imagination the computer would not be the same, and vice versa. A historiographic dismembering of the architect’s various discrete (and indiscreet) machines reveals shared: memory storage and retrieval systems; mechanisms for deletion and forgetting; windows, guns, pens, nozzles; universal languages, algorithms and other compressive strategies in the calculation of true products; taming of chance by prediction. Like Humpty Dumpty, once apart, they will not go back together again and thus complicate beyond retrieval the already waning platitudes of optimisation and digital solutionism. Instead they suggest potential new categories with which to mutually reconstitute architecture’s relations to computation: the appetite; the mediocre; the alienated; the duped and the promise of the automatic.

 

ARCH 7108 (13131)

Domo Ludens: Modern Art and Architecture at Play

Michael Schlabs

M 9:20am-11:15am

The notion of play occupies a special place in the history of modern art and architecture. Theorized in the 19th century by Friedrich Froebel as fundamental to the process by which children learn, play would form the basis of Froebel’s kindergarten, now a model for early childhood education worldwide. The aesthetic intensity of Froebel’s program would likewise contribute to a variety of radical educational projects in the 19th and 20th centuries, including the Bauhaus. Later, Johan Huizinga’s seminal meditation on the “play element in culture,” Homo Ludens, would provide an intellectual foundation for a number of 20th century aesthetic and political movements, among them the Situationist International. Finally, a generous focus on play has recently reemerged within the discourse on a range of 21st century art and design practices, characterized by a shared focus on participation and performativity, as in the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija and Lottie Child. This course, then, explores the place and problem of play in three ways: as a critical framework for understanding the aesthetic qualities of the human environment; as a mode of experience, giving meaning to that environment; and as a working method employed by artists and architects as a specific form of practice.

 

ARCH 7111 (13134)

Knowledge Sharing Spaces

Summer Sutton Adlparvar

T 9:20am-11:15am

This course explores the complexities of Indigenous architecture in the United States, not only as a study of historical and cultural influence on the built environment but also as a reflection of Indigenous sovereignty, articulated through spatial design. The seminar delves into the principles, philosophies and socio-political settings that shape a range of Indigenous architectural practices where themes of communication and “knowledge sharing” play a fundamental role in design. From the construction of schools and museums to cosmological structures and water management facilities, the architectural function of exchanging or sharing knowledge through the built environment weaves a common narrative in Indigenous architecture. The premise of “knowledge sharing spaces” informs the critical lens in which to evaluate past and present architecture designed by and/or for Indigenous communities. Throughout the semester, case studies that both contest and contend with broad issues of colonialism, Eurocentric narratives of indigeneity, cultural appropriation, environmental stewardship, community engagement, and Indigenous recognition, are examined within the context of communicative architecture. Amplifying Indigenous voices and viewpoints in the practice of “knowledge sharing spaces” reveals new depth and layers to architectural design that is primed for informed analysis and discussion.

 

ARCH 7117 (13141)

Spatial Concepts of Japan: Their Origins and Development in Architecture and Urbanism

Yoko Kawaii

W 1:30-3:25pm

The seminar explores the origins and developments of Japanese spatial concepts and surveys how they help form the contemporary architecture, ways of life, and cities of the country. Many Japanese spatial concepts, such as ma, are about creating time-space distances and relationship between objects, people, space, and experiences. These concepts go beyond the fabric of a built structure and encompass architecture, landscape, and city. Each class is designed around one or two Japanese words that signify particular design concepts. Each week, a lecture on the word(s) with its design features, backgrounds, historical examples, and contemporary application is followed by student discussion. Contemporary works studied include those by Maki, Isozaki, Ando, Ito, SANAA, and Fujimoto. The urbanism and landscape of Tokyo and Kyoto are discussed. Students are required to make in-class presentations and write a final paper. Limited enrollment.

 

ARCH 7124 (13144)

Architecture and Disability

David Gissen

Th 9:20am-11:15am

Architects have explored the topic of disability and human impairment well before and beyond contemporary practices of “accessible design.” This seminar examines histories of architecture, disability, and human impairment through a range of case-studies from 1900 to the present. We will understand how disability transformed (and was transformed by) the practices of modern and late-modern architects and designers – from early 20th century theories of design to recent debates on the aesthetic character of urban monuments. To explore these histories, we will draw on an interdisciplinary range of readings, documents, films, and physical artifacts. The course will include a mix of lectures and discussion, guest presentations, and the development of a final research project related to the course case-studies and readings.

 

ARCH 7127 (13147)

Body Politics

Joel Sanders

F 9:20am-11:15am

COVID-19 underscores how public health and environmental justice are intimately related. This seminar explores the urgent need for transdisciplinary teams representing design, science, and the humanities to create safe, hygienic, accessible, and inclusive spaces that accommodate all bodies, including people of different races, genders, religions, and abilities that fall out of the cultural mainstream. Through in-depth analysis of everyday spaces—homes, workplaces, hospitals, museums—we look at how the conventions of architecture, transmitted through building typologies, standards, and codes, have marginalized or excluded persons who fall outside white, masculine, heterosexual, able-bodied norms. After analyzing each of these sites in their cultural and historical context, students generate innovative design proposals that allow a spectrum of differently embodied and culturally identified people to productively mix in a post-pandemic world. Limited enrollment.

 

ARCH 7128 (13152)

An Atlas of Postmodernism

Mark Gage

F 1:30pm-3:25pm

This class will explore the architecture of Postmodernism as architecture’s allergic response to the ahistorical, acontextual, self-referential language that modernism had become by the mid-20th century. By pushing aside history, context, and social concerns, modernism of that period exhausted itself of its potential, and restless architects began to explore new forms of architectural creativity that incorporated figuration. precedent, color, and representation as they sought to make the discipline more responsive to the wider expanses of 20th century culture. Such exploration is particularly timely in the architectural climate of today, where a “default” of non-ideological modernism tends to operate unquestioned and history is suppressed as a tool to inform design. The fine print of this course is the belief that through relying on celebrating abstract narratives of virtue or sustainability over the aesthetics of built form the field has once-again lost its power in the cultural imagination of the public. By studying how the Postmodern movement reclaimed agency and the interest of the public, the course seeks to inform and empower students to do the same in their own creative ways in the future. Two aspects of Postmodernism were critical to its early and nearly viral success- its flirtations with historic classicism, and its emphasis on humor and wit through challenging, bending, and breaking the rules of that same classicism. Accordingly, students will be taught the language of classical architecture using an abbreviated version of the system taught at the Ecole Des Beaux Arts for centuries (a system through which the course professor was educated). With this newfound knowledge and skills, students will themselves design new versions of some of postmodernism’s most iconic projects that will exhibit fresh takes on architectural humor, irony, and wit. These will include several projects that numerous postmodernist architects designed simultaneously, allowing for “apples to apples” comparisons, including the iconic “tea piazza” sets for Alessi, miniature façades for the 1980 Venice Biennale’s famous “Strada Novissima,” and an “extremely late entry” for the Chicago Tribune Tower competition held in 1922 and again in 1986. These design projects will be seen as a re-imagining for today of what, often Yale-affiliated, architects such as Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, James Sterling, Leon Krier, Robert A.M. Stern, Michael Graves, Terry Farrell, Kengo Kuma, Charles Moore and others attempted to do nearly fifty years ago. Students will research the work of these architects, and also discover a number of architects who have been overlooked and deserve new consideration. This course was originally taught at Yale by former Dean Robert A.M. Stern, who was a key player in architectural postmodernism, and as-such the course will rely not only on readings but also first-hand accounts of the architects and architecture that, as noted by theorist Sylvia Lavin, came to become the world’s first truly global architectural movement.

 

ARCH 7129 (13153)

Extrastatecraft: Global Infrastructure to Planetary Solidarity

Keller Easterling

Th 9:20am-11:15am

Recent surges in the last 500 years of colonizing, capitalizing, and globalizing may be more treacherous and untraceable than those of previous empires. This course exposes their infrastructures. While it begins with the global colonial extraction networks, most of the material circles around the spatial apparatus deployed toward the end of the twentieth century that accompanied what is often amnesically referred to as “globalization.” This infrastructure is not only the infrastructure of pipes and wires underground but also the ubiquitous enveloping urban medium of repeatable formulas for space—a human/nonhuman socio-technical space that is rapidly producing a new layer of the earth’s crust. Critiqued by both the left and the populist right this massive physical plant contains a spectrum of dangers: capitalism, fascism, racism, whiteness, settler colonialism, femicide, caste, xenophobia, psychotic leadership, and countless other ways of hoarding power, abusing people, and damaging the planet. The story resists and exceeds any easy ideological explanations or definitions of the neoliberalism with which this moment is associated—a moment when, not rational actors and nation states, but an often irrational extrastatecraft deploys stealthy, bullet-proof forms of power. Discussion is interspersed with heavily illustrated talks that encounter: instant free zone world cities, satellite urbanism and broadband from the perspective of Non-Aligned countries in South Asia and Africa, labor, conflict, and climate migration, an agripole in Southern Spain, automated ports, islands and offshore financial centers as the confetti of multiple empires, contagious spatial products of commerce and tourism, a cruise ship to the DPRK, the standards and management platforms of ISO, sweatshops, tax havens, and exploding urban peripheries among many other things. Going beyond the anointed legal, scientific, and econometric languages, the seminar also uncovers forms of spatially-embedded activism to meet this moment. The evidence returns to moments of worldmaking solidarity within newly independent colonies in the Global South—solidarities between the Pan-African, Non-Aligned, Tricontinental, and civil rights movements that the Global North broke by further tilting the playing fields in their own favor. And the seminar considers the infrastructures that dominant infrastructures eclipsed—live infrastructures of land, water, atmosphere, and community—to be as worthy of public support as infrastructures of concrete and conduit. As reparations for patterns of harm that will otherwise only continue, these alternative infrastructures are inextricably linked to climate change and planetary concerns. If the global conjures associations with White Enlightenment modern universals, singular evils and singular solutions, planetary conjures the patchy, partial, multiple approaches in the pluriverse. Treating everyone as a designer, the course is an adventure in thinking as well as a mixing chamber for disciplines across the university: social sciences, arts, economics, business history, science and technology studies, history of science, organization studies, informatics, media and communication studies, architecture and urbanism. Cultural ephemera is screened as a prelude to each lecture. Weekly readings offer evidence, discursive commentary, and critique. Tutorials help to shape group work.

 

ARCH 7133 (13154)

Anti-Eugenic Architecture

David Gissen

W 1:30pm-3:25pm

We examine the parameters of an “anti-eugenic architecture”—histories, theories, and design practices that counter narrow concepts of human improvement, health, and national belonging. Eugenics was a turn-of-the-century pseudoscience of genetic selection and racecraft that continues to haunt histories of architecture, urban planning, and infrastructural design. We review key histories of eugenics, their manifestations in global modern and late modern architecture and urbanism, and the parameters of alternative practices that foster more complex concepts of human community. Final projects take the form of individual and collective works.

 

ARCH 7134 (13155)

Space and Subjectivity

Jordan Carver

W 4pm-5:55pm

This seminar investigates how space operates in the process of subject formation. That is, how the built environment—including infrastructure, housing, borders, segregation, taxation, and policing—are integral to processes of creating subject categories and identity. Rather than thinking of space, architecture, and design as a medium for subjectivity and identity, the class proposes space as an integral participant in forming these complex relations. This discussion-based seminar looks at space and architecture in relation to race, gender, sex, domesticity, class, power, capital, ability, politics, and citizenship and how these many forms of subjectivity overlap and intersect. Texts are drawn from within and outside architecture, situating architectural discourse along other research in the humanities.

 

ARCH 7135 (13156)

Utopias, Counter-Utopias, Heterotopias: An Architectural and Urban History

Craig Buckley

T 9:25am-11:20am

The seminar engages the recent return of utopian thinking at a time defined by multiple catastrophes, from climate change to housing shortage to rising authoritarianism. The seminar begins with an introduction to canonized utopian narratives, including Plato, More, and Bacon. Throughout the seminar we engage with key authors who have interpreted utopian traditions in architecture (including Marx, Balibar, Benhabib, Bloch, Foucault, Hayden, Jameson, Marin, and Vidler, among others). Particular emphasis is given to changes in the conception of utopia across time together with the shifting representational techniques through which utopia was envisioned. The readings are structured around a series of architectural projects for utopian cities or buildings that have emerged since the early nineteenth century. Topics may include Charles Fourier’s Phalansteries, the Shaker Village of Hancock, Robert Owen’s Plans for the town of New Harmony, late-nineteenth-century cooperative housing schemes, expressionist utopias of the early twentieth century; Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon project, drop out communes of the 1960s, Afro-futurism, and the counter-utopias of the Italian Radical movement, among others. Sessions with material from Yale’s collections are emphasized to the greatest extent possible with multiple sessions at Beinecke library. Each student selects an example of utopianism in architecture and develop visual and textual documentation, presentation, and analysis.

 

ARCH 8107 (13157)

History of Landscape Architecture: Antiquity to 1700 in Western Europe

Warren Fuermann

F 9:20am-11:15am

This course presents an introductory survey of the history of gardens and the interrelationship of architecture and landscape architecture in Western Europe from antiquity to 1700, focusing primarily on Italy. The course examines chronologically the evolution of several key elements in landscape design: architectural and garden typologies; the boundaries between inside and outside; issues of topography and geography; various uses of water; organization of plant materials; and matters of garden decoration, including sculptural tropes. Specific gardens or representations of landscape in each of the four periods under discussion—Ancient Roman, medieval, early and late Renaissance, and Baroque—are examined and situated within their own cultural context. Throughout the seminar, comparisons of historical material with contemporary landscape design are emphasized. Limited enrollment.

 

ARCH 8117 (13161)

Out of Date: Expired Patents and Unrealized Histories

Anthony Acciavatti

T 9:20am-11:15am

What if the US Army Corps of Engineers had developed “soft infrastructures” and “living systems” for dealing with the changing flows of the Mississippi in and around New Orleans? What if Henry Ford had used soy protein for automotive parts and synthetic meats in the 1940s? Or what if South Asian nation states had adopted the Ganges Water Machine model in the 1970s to address critical water shortages in urban areas? What do these three, seemingly disparate examples all have in common? Each is based on a patent or series of patents that were never adopted for one reason or another. This course is structured in three parts. First, we examine different techniques of conducting historical research using patents. Second, each week we read a primary and secondary texts as well as closely examine a specific patent related to the texts. We collectively hallucinate on what might have been had this patent been adopted. Third, in consultation with the instructor, participants choose a particular patent that they study carefully throughout the term and imagining what a city, a landscape, a block, or even an entire region might have looked like had such a patent been adopted. We carefully study why this particular patent was said to fail.

 

ARCH 8119 (13164)

Interface as Infrastructure

Instructor TBA 

F 1:30pm-3:25pm

Urban technology is not neutral infrastructure. It is a design decision with civic consequences. Zoning formulas, benefits portals, predictive analytics, and open data platforms determine access, allocate space, and encode power, often without public scrutiny or architectural discourse. This seminar asks students to see these systems the way a planner sees a street: as something built, something governable, something that can be repaired. The first half of the course builds shared language and critical frameworks. The second half moves into practice, with guest speakers, case studies, and original research in which each student traces an urban technology through its interactions with government process and lived experience, then imagines an alternative. The question driving the course is not what these systems do, but what they could become.

 

ARCH 8120 (13165)

Seeing Like a Forest: Dispersed and Interconnected Communities of Nature

Ana Duran

Time TBA

Amazonian archaeology has been advancing at an unprecedented pace thanks to the rise of new technologies such as aerial photography, satellite imagery, LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), and now AI, a powerful tool to unveil bio and geo-cultural patterns in the landscape. The ancient tropical cities that are emerging to the surface, and whose temporality will acquire greater resolution as ground truth research advances, are regional in scale and do not cleanly fit within dominant paradigms of the city: low-density urbanisms, diffuse urbanisms, distributed or rhizomatic and heterarchical regional networks, interconnected and agroecological urban constellations, agrarian garden cities, and other combinations emerge to name what the Quechua/Quichua call a llakta, a territorial city, a Living Territory, where nature and culture are indivisible, as are the physical and energetic or spiritual realms. We can describe with words the morphologies of these regional urbanisms (urbs), speculate about the citizens/citizenships of the past (civitas), or attempt to diagram their power structures (polis), but nothing is more revealing of the variegated and unique character of these complex urbanisms than their image. In this research seminar we learn about, and drawing, three “low density agrarian urbanisms” that have been described in detail for the Amazonian biome. The visual outcomes of this seminar will be showcased in the exhibition “Dien Dien: to feel the other and weave a territory,” the third iteration of “Surfacing - The Civilized Agroecological Forests of Amazonia,” which will be housed in a83 gallery, in New York.

 

ARCH 9901 (10130)

Ph.D. Seminar: History/Theory I: Adv. Topics in the History & Theory of Arch. since World War II

David Gissen

F 1:30pm-3:25pm

Research in Reverse: Epistemologies of Doubt To research is to doubt. It follows that in order to research we must first elaborate a practice of incredulity, one able to foster archival intervals of indeterminacy and delay which resist the inevitability of the teleological, the required conclusion. In the present climate of digitally augmented, extreme instrumental and epistemological certitude, the seminar will frame the impetus, fuel and labour of research as not only the doubt which famously precedes thought, but also the doubt that untethers determinism, complicates reductivism and that, ever-lingering, refuses to be dispelled. Just as the construction of architectural veracity is distinct from that in other disciplines, so too is architectural doubt. Architecture (likely plagued by internal doubt) is itself most intolerant of doubt. The readings will return us to the several key apparatuses architecture has historically used to construct certitude, if not artful ‘surrogates for truth’, to invoke Ian Hacking, within its various reproductive regimes: metaphoric; typological; statistical; material; algorithmic; linguistic. The analysis of how within each new reproductive regime the relations between certitude and doubt are reconfigured will inform our exploration of alternative methodological and epistemological pathways for doubting the laws, metaphors, algorithms and now probabilistic distributions that guarantee the ‘doubt-free’ productions to which the discipline is traditionally so beholden. Guest presentations by practitioners-of-doubt will supplement our discussions.

 

ARCH 9903 (10131) 

Ph.D. Seminar: History/Theory III

David Gissen

F 1:30-3:25pm

Research in Reverse: Epistemologies of Doubt. To research is to doubt. It follows that in order to research we must first elaborate a practice of incredulity, one able to foster archival intervals of indeterminacy and delay which resist the inevitability of the teleological, the required conclusion. In the present climate of digitally augmented, extreme instrumental and epistemological certitude, the seminar will frame the impetus, fuel and labour of research as not only the doubt which famously precedes thought, but also the doubt that untethers determinism, complicates reductivism and that, ever-lingering, refuses to be dispelled. Just as the construction of architectural veracity is distinct from that in other disciplines, so too is architectural doubt. Architecture (likely plagued by internal doubt) is itself most intolerant of doubt. The readings will return us to the several key apparatuses architecture has historically used to construct certitude, if not artful ‘surrogates for truth’, to invoke Ian Hacking, within its various reproductive regimes: metaphoric; typological; statistical; material; algorithmic; linguistic. The analysis of how within each new reproductive regime the relations between certitude and doubt are reconfigured will inform our exploration of alternative methodological and epistemological pathways for doubting the laws, metaphors, algorithms and now probabilistic distributions that guarantee the ‘doubt-free’ productions to which the discipline is traditionally so beholden. Guest presentations by practitioners-of-doubt will supplement our discussions.

 

ARCH 9906 (10132)

Ph.D. Seminar: Ecosystems in Architecture I

Anna Dyson

Th 4pm-5:55pm

Required in, and limited to, Ph.D first year, fall term, Ecosystems track. Seminar content includes discourse analysis.

 

 

ARCH 9908 (10133)

Ph.D. Seminar: Ecosystems in Architecture III

Anna Dyson

Th 4-5:55pm

Required in, and limited to, Ph.D. second year, fall term, Ecosystems track. Seminar covers scientific methods in bioclimatic analysis.

 

CLSS 7360 (12521)

Eco-Poetry

Pauline LeVen

F 9:25am-11:20am

Ecocriticism focuses on the relation between literature, culture, and the nonhuman world. This seminar introduces students to a variety of theories in the environmental humanities (such as material ecocriticism, critical plant studies, decolonial ecocriticism, the Blue Humanities, econarratology, etc.) that relate the environment and the nonhuman world to literature and ask how these theories can be used or questioned when studying the poetry of Graeco-Roman Antiquity. Authors queried range from Homer, Hesiod, and Sappho to Theocritus, Lucretius, Virgil, and Nonnus. This seminar is taught in conjunction with the Departmental Colloquium (“Classics and the Environmental Humanities,” co-organized by P. LeVen and E. Valdivieso in 2026–2027).

 

CPLT 5070 (11358) / SPAN 7705 / ER&M 6547

Carceral Disability Studies: The Case of the Philippines

Aurelie Vialette

M 1:30pm-3:25pm

This seminar examines the racial, ethical, political, environmental, and social implications of the penal colonization process in the Philippines through the lens of disability studies. Carceral disability studies is in great need of exploration and that is the aim of this seminar. We analyze archival documents (manuscripts) from the Philippines and engage with theoretical and historical texts on disability, prison labor, racial capitalism, ecocriticism, Indigenous studies, carceral studies, gender studies, and law and the humanities. Overseas incarceration was a method employed by empires to dispose of criminals, the poor, sex workers, and vagrants. In the Philippines (a Spanish colony until 1898), the dispossession of indigenous people of their land and the implication of intensive farming were also consequences of the colonial project. We see that labor and procreation were crucial to using prisoners to build the colonial structure and strengthen the Spanish presence in the archipelago. We discover the centrality of this transnational and transhistorical approach to understanding the contemporary treatment of imprisoned people and the centrality of disability studies to understand mass incarceration today. Course in Spanish or English depending on the students enrolled. Spanish reading knowledge is mandatory.

 

ENV 633 (14796)

Critical Race Theory

Gerald Torres

Day/Time TBA

This class studies critical race theory from its origins to its current expression. Understanding the deep interconnections between race and law, and how race and law are co-constitutive, is the project of critical race theory. One of the central claims of critical race theory is that racial subordination is not a deviation from the liberal legal ideal but is, unfortunately, part of its expression. We focus on the origins of the critique that is central to the development of the theory and contrast its analysis with conventional analytic frameworks on race and American law and society. Because it is a positive theory but also driven by a normative vision, we explore the possibility of transforming the relationship between law and racial power. The law is not the only site of critical race theory; it has had a significant impact on other disciplines in the social sciences. We examine those impacts as well.

 

ENV 682 (14803)

Environmental Justice/Water Justice

Gerald Torres

Day/Time TBA

The basic premise of this course is that water is about power. Water problems around the world are not being experienced equally by different sectors of society but rather reflect—and exacerbate—underlying current and historical power asymmetries among different communities and identities. These inequalities are not limited to the issue of water rights (who gets how much water) but can be found across the whole range of water issues, from water quality to flooding to the impacts of dams. Likewise, these inequalities are reflected not just in the rules that determine water distribution, but also in the infrastructure, institutions, information, and incentives that form the basis of water management. This course explores the complex intersections of water access, equity, and environmental sustainability rights, and environmental justice. It examines historical and contemporary issues surrounding water distribution, policymaking, and the impact on marginalized communities. Through case studies and critical analysis, students engage with environmental justice, policymaking, and community action concepts, aiming to foster a deeper understanding of the need for equitable water distribution and governance in a changing climate.

 

ENV 759A / ANTH 581A

Power, Knowledge, and the Environment: Social Science Theory and Metho

Michael Dove

Mon 1:00pm-3:50pm

Introductory graduate course on the social science of contemporary environmental and natural resource challenges, paying special attention to issues involving power and knowledge, first looking at the scope of ethnography, the global connections of a tribal longhouse in Borneo, the political ecology of water in Mumbai, and micro vs macro views of irrigation in Egypt; next perspectives, waste politics in Beijing,  the view from within development projects, and the view from disadvantaged communities; and finally representation, of indigenous people, of the poor, and of development. The goal of the course is to develop analytic distance from current conservation and development debates and discourse.

 

ENV 836 (13251) / ANTH 6841 / HIST 8160 / PLSC 7790 / SOCY 7170

Agrarian Societies: Culture, Society, History, and Development

Jonathan Wyrtzen and Elisabeth Wood

W 1:30pm-3:25pm

An interdisciplinary examination of agrarian societies, contemporary and historical, Western and non-Western. Major analytical perspectives from anthropology, economics, history, political science, and environmental studies are used to develop a meaning-centered and historically grounded account of the transformations of rural society. Team-taught.

 

ER&M 65555 (11292) / HIST 7440 / AMST 7040

American West and Its Borderlands

Stephen Pitti

W 1:30pm-3:25pm

This reading seminar examines historical scholarship on the US West and the US-Mexico border region with particular attention to recent works. It also attends to the development of the region’s historiography. Topics include colonialism, migration, labor, urbanization, segregation, and political activism, and we pay careful attention to writings on the region’s Latinx, Indigenous, Asian American, and Black communities. The seminar is designed for students pursuing graduate work in history, and in particular for those preparing for oral examinations or dissertation topics on the region or one of these key topics.

 

HIST 8536 (10416)

The City in Imperial China

Maura Dykstra

W 1:30pm-3:25pm

This course surveys the philosophical and practical dimensions of city organization and governance from the walled domains and ritual federations of Early China to the highly-controlled wards and streets of Middle China and the sophisticated administrative institutions of Late Imperial urban municipalities. The development of imperial cities is situated in the particular traditions and sources of Chinese dynasties and empires while also held in conversation with the broader field of urban history (especially during the Early Modern modules of the seminar).

 

HIST 8832 (10419)

Infrastructures of Power

Nurfadzilah Yahaya

W 9:25am-11:20am

This seminar examines infrastructure as a site of power, exploring how built systems, from irrigation networks and railroads to telegraph cables and oil extraction, produced and sustained colonial and postcolonial conditions. We ask how infrastructure projects created new forms of territorial control, legal authority, and environmental transformation across multiple historical contexts, how these systems were experienced by different populations, and how they continue to shape contemporary possibilities. We trace infrastructure across global contexts, attending to the technical, legal, and social dimensions of projects that remade landscapes and governance structures. The course moves from foundational theoretical approaches through historical case studies, concluding with analyses of how these systems persist, fail, or get repurposed in the present. Students develop a final research project analyzing an infrastructure system of their choice in specific locations.

 

HSAR 6579 (10451)

Modernism and the Middle East

Kishwar Rizvi

This course studies the concepts that inform the making and reception of modern architecture in the Middle East. In the Islamic world, new fundamentalisms and shifting religious trends have created an environment in which each country must renegotiate its past and reconsider its collective future. Whether by suppressing their Islamic roots, as in the case of republican Turkey, or through reinventing them, as in the case of post-Revolution Iran, such countries must constantly transform their national image. It is through public works, such as architecture and planning, that they convey their political and religious ideology. This course examines the debates and theories of modern architectural production that have informed the discourse on Islamic architecture by situating cases of colonial and nationalist architecture in the context of their particular social and religious history.

 

MESO 5450 (13095)

The Great City: Neo-Assyrian Ninevah

Eckart Frahm

M 4pm-5:55pm

Survey of the history of the Assyrian city of Nineveh and its changing urban landscape, with a focus on developments between the ninth and seventh centuries BCE, when Nineveh became the world’s largest urban center. Emphasis on palaces, temples, libraries, parks, roads, fortifications, gates, and public spaces. Nineveh’s legacy in the Hebrew Bible and classical literature are discussed as well, as is the city’s excavation history, including recent salvage work in the wake of the destruction wrought upon the site by ISIS. While mostly based on written sources, the course also considers some of the archaeological evidence. Prerequisite: Beginning Akkadian.

 

NELC 7460 (13166)

In the Gardens of the Pharaohs: Organic Craft Productions and Chaînes Opératoires

Gregory Marouard

T 1:30pm-3:25pm

This course focuses on the origins of organic resources, the manufacturing techniques, and the extensive talented skills hidden behind exceptional Egyptian objects that can be seen in museum collections. Since the late Neolithic period and the early fourth millennium BCE, ancient Egyptians developed significant skills for transforming the various vegetal resources available in their environment, in the Nile Valley, in its delta, as in more remote areas such like the western oasis or the eastern desert. Many craft productions, sometimes supported by the Pharaonic central state, occupied a foundational importance to guaranty the continuation and the resilience of this ancient civilization over several millennia. This constant quest for ensuring the subsistence, sustainability, and various levels—from simple to more elaborated—craft production, forged important aspects of the Egyptian civilization and economy, enhanced its complex administrative system, even dictated its political relationship with neighboring countries. This seminar investigates in detail the ancient Egyptian organic resources, related techniques, even proto industries, through the scope of archaeological, historical and socioeconomical data, using material culture, iconographic data and sometimes textual sources. Ethnoarchaeological and experimental approaches of various chaîne-opératoire are discussed to illustrate and reconstruct skills, gestures, and craftsmanship expertise that have now completely disappeared.

 

REL 6635 (12686)

Creaturely Agency and the Contestation of the Human

Jennifer Herdt

W 1:30-3:20pm

What it is to be human is often defined by way of contrast to animality. This contrastive definition of the human is peculiarly salient when it comes to the ethical: human beings are moral agents, persons, characterized by self-ownership, responsibility, and accountability; other animals are outside the ethical. Theologically, these claims to human exceptionalism are bound up with the doctrine of the imago dei and with the Incarnation; philosophically, with claims regarding human dignity. But “the human” is now under fire from multiple directions: posthumanism, animality studies, race and animality studies. Meanwhile, cognitive ethology, comparative psychology, and evolutionary anthropology are revealing new things about the agency of human and nonhuman animals. How ought we think about agency and responsibility, both human and nonhuman, in light of all of these developments? And what possibilities emerge for the doctrine of the imago dei and for the confession of Christ as fully and perfectly human, moving forward? Area II.

 

REL 7745 (12699)

Byzantine Art and Architecture

Vasileios Marinis

T 1:30pm-3:20pm

This lecture course explores the art, architecture, and material culture of the Byzantine Empire from the foundation of its capital, Constantinople, in the fourth century to the fifteenth century. Centered around the Eastern Mediterranean, Byzantium was a dominant political power in Europe for several centuries and fostered a highly sophisticated artistic culture. This course aims to familiarize students with key objects and monuments from various media—mosaic, frescoes, wooden panels, metalwork, ivory carvings—and from a variety of contexts—public and private, lay and monastic, imperial and political. We give special attention to issues of patronage, propaganda, reception, and theological milieux, as well as the interaction of architecture and ritual. More generally, students become acquainted with the methodological tools and vocabulary that art historians employ to describe, understand, and interpret works of art. Area III and Area V.

 

REL 7747 (12700)

Islamic Art and Architecture in the Mediterranean

Orgu Dalgic

W 1:30pm-3:20pm

This course surveys the history of Islamic cultures through their rich material expressions beginning from the time of the Prophet Muhammed in the seventh century to the present and extending across the Mediterranean from Spain to Syria. The course aims to familiarize students with the major periods, regions, monuments, and media of the Islamic cultures around the Mediterranean and with basic principles of Islam as they pertain to the visual arts and, in particular, their interactions with the Christian world. We discuss architecture (mosques, madrasas, mausolea, etc.) as well as works of art in various media (calligraphy, illuminated manuscripts, textiles, ceramics, etc.) within both the Islamic and the larger, universal, and cross-cultural contexts. Area III and Area V.

 

REL 7759 (12703)

Land, Ecology, and Religion in U.S. History

Tisa Wenger

M 1:30pm-3:20pm

This course explores the varied intersections among land, ecology, and religion in U.S. history and situates American religion within a broader history of the Anthropocene. How have religious ideologies and institutions worked to shape American spaces, places, and landscapes? In an age of accelerating ecological crisis, how have diverse religious groups interacted with, participated in, or reacted against the environmental movement? How have race, gender, settler colonialism, and other intersectional social formations shaped these histories? How are the social formations we call religions implicated in and reinvented by the climactic transformations of the Anthropocene? Area III.

 

REL 8849 (12715)

Earth-Honoring Witness as Public Theology

Carolyn Sharp

W 1:30pm-3:20pm

This course considers ways to bear witness to the inherent value of Earth as a living and interconnected community that teaches profound theological and ethical truths. Through sustained reflection on preaching and other proclamatory practices understood as public theology, students explore such issues as: ways in which scripture passages testify to the intricate glories and stark vulnerabilities of creation as a site of the transforming work of the divine; the intelligence, giftedness, moral agency, and relational sophistication of other-than-human creatures; human sin as a major vector for harms that are catalyzing global ecological disaster and causing enormous suffering in creation; and grace as the divine intention not just for humanity but for all living beings, Earth, and the cosmos. Engaging contemporary homiletical theory and studying sermons from expert preachers, students develop their homiletical skills and their capacity to envision and advocate for the restoration of Earth and the flourishing of its communities. Together students listen for the Gospel in sermons focused on creation, climate justice, and interspecies kinship; explore the potential of micro-homilies to build the capacity of faith communities for ecotheological reflection and Earth-honoring praxis; and attend to poetry and memoir writing as sources of wisdom. This course meets the Preaching/Public Address distributional requirement for the M.Div. degree. Area IV. M.Div. students are expected to have taken Hebrew Bible Interpretation and New Testament Interpretation. No prerequisite applies to students in other Divinity degrees or to YSE students.