Graduate Courses Spring 2026

AFAM 5484 (23371) / SOCY 7840

Elijah Anderson

M 11:30am-1:20pm

Urban inequality in America. The racial iconography of the city is explored and represented, and the dominant cultural narrative of civic pluralism is considered. Topics of concern include urban poverty, race relations, ethnicity, class, privilege, education, social networks, social deviance, and crime.

 

ANTH 6816 (23590)

Erik Harms

T 1:30-3:20pm

This course grapples with the surprisingly complex relationships people have with shadows, both real and imaginary, material and metaphorical, across cultures, in varied geographies, and at different points in time. If storytellers sometimes evoke the shadows of night to portend sentiments of doom, they also sometimes draw on shadows to describe spaces of sanctuary and escape. If the worst parts of human experience are said to cast a shadow over the living, it is worth remembering that the comfort of shade is a kind of shadow too. Criminals rely on shadows to conceal illegal activities and even death itself is said to lurk in the shadows, but artists use shadow to represent the world in three dimensions, imbuing a kind of life into the empty whiteness of flat paper. Undesirable governments cast shadows over their people, but people seeking to flee state oppression might find the shadows a convivial place to hide. All these dualities promise to make shadow an elusive but provocative topic that will demand the nuanced kinds of reading and discussion that can animate a good seminar. Using shadows as our provocation, the course is modeled on what anthropologists call praxis—a combination of theory and practical engagement with the real world. On the one hand, our praxis involves empirical engagement with actual shadows, both through course readings and engaged assignments (e.g., adopting a shadow for the semester, studying Javanese shadow puppets, making a sundial, observing shade patterns in New Haven, and engaging in playful experiments that fit the needs of the class as they emerge through the semester). On the other hand, our praxis uses shadow as a flexible theoretical prompt that allows us to move through conceptual readings drawn from philosophy, analytic psychology, art history, folklore, literature, and, of course, anthropology. Expect readings from beyond anthropology (by authors like Bloch, Casati, DaVinci, Jung, Plato and Tanizaki) as well as anthropologists (like Sophie Chao, Jane Goodall, Mary Douglas, Michael Dove, Erik Mueggler, Carolyn Nordstrom, James Siegel, Terence Turner, and more). No specific prerequisites exist for this course, but students should note that it is designed to appeal to students with a background in humanistic social sciences, so it is desired to have some background in anthropology or adjacent fields like sociology, intellectual history, social theory, philosophy, art history, humanistic area studies, and so on. Students without such background, but who come with practical skills in optics, physics, fine arts, astronomy or sextant-based navigation may appeal in writing to the instructor for special permission.

 

ANTH 7185 (21739) / ARCG 7185

Anne Underhill

Time TBA

Ceramics are a rich source of information about a range of topics including ancient technology, cooking practices, craft specialization, regional trade, and religious beliefs. This course provides a foundation for investigating such topics and gaining practical experience in archaeological analysis of ceramics. Students have opportunities to focus on ceramics of particular interest to them, whether these are low-fired earthen wares, or porcelains. We discuss ancient pottery production and use made in diverse contexts ranging from households in villages to workshops in cities. In addition we refer to the abundant ethnoarchaeological data about traditional pottery production.

 

ANTH 7272 (20038) / ARCG 7272

Piphal Heng

Th 1:30-3:20pm

Archaeological studies of ancient cities and urbanism. Topics include the origin and growth of cities; the economic, social, and political implications of urban life; and archaeological methods and theories for the study of ancient urbanism. Case studies include ancient cities around the world.

 

ANTH 8898 (22151) / HIST 5805 / HSAR 6842 / HSHM 7692

Paul Sabin

T 11:30-1:20pm

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. Open only to students pursuing the Graduate Certificate in Environmental Humanities. 

 

ARCH 5101 (22515)

Mark Gage

Th 11am-12:50pm

This seminar explores the role of beauty, wonder, and awe in the design and experience of our world. For most of the 20th century, these subjects were either entirely ignored in academia, or worse, cast exclusively as nefarious mechanisms of control used only by those in power. And yet who among us has not been uplifted by a scene in a film, a piece of music, an object, a work of art or architecture—or perhaps even something as unassuming as a beautifully cascading pile of laundry? This course will work under the assumption that such positive human experiences are needed more now than ever in a world increasingly defined by pessimism, criticism, and division. As such we will work under the assumption that beauty, wonder, and awe exist, and that they are worthy of a contemporary re-assessment, especially in the context of creative practices that are interested in producing a more equitable, beautiful, and just human future.Through both philosophical and popular readings, the study of physical objects, and engaged discussion and lively debate, we will examine beauty, awe, and wonder from all possible angles- what they mean today, their history, why they are desired, how they might be produced, the motivations of those that promote them, and how they are being reconsidered not as the nefarious enemies of function or equality, but rather essential and ethically significant aspects of human experience.In order to address these subjects beyond an abstract academic setting, we will have visitors from various creative industries come to class to discuss these subjects relative to their own work and disciplines- including Jessica Diehl, the former creative director of Vanity Fair magazine, and Michael Young, a practicing architect deeply engaged with the subjects of aesthetics and representation. Students in the course will also (pending confirmation) visit New York City to explore and discuss these subjects at multiple scales, live and in person with the instructor, by viewing everything from architectural facades and urban monuments to medieval armor and Faberge eggs.This course will resist the inherited lore of academia that casts beauty, wonder, and awe only elitist or oppressive, in favor of asking how they can be better understood and incorporated into the design of a more humane world. In doing so we will explore the work of contemporary thinkers who offer nourishment to this endeavor including but not limited to Elaine Scarry, Jane Bennett, Timothy Morton, bell hooks, Nick Zangwill, Dacher Keltner, Georgio Agamben, Susan Magsamen, and others, including recent writings on aesthetics by the course instructor. Limited enrollment.

 

ARCH 6614 (22557)

Dana Karwas

Th 11am-12:50pm

The Mechanical Artifact is a course designed to engage students to our unfolding sci-fi space future. In this course, students will work in groups to design, build, test, and deploy a space artifact of their own. Though the process of designing an artifact for a zero-gravity environment, students will question known forms of spatial representation through movement, mechanism, and meaning. The artifacts will be tested on a parabolic zero gravity research flight at the end of the semester.

 

ARCH 6115 (22526)

Mae-Ling Lokko

T 11am-12:50pm

Across global landfill sites, the inability of increasing quantities of material surplus from various sectors to “return to the soil” has brought into sharp focus the biological incompatibility between today’s overground and underground material systems. Meanwhile, global crop residues (agricultural by-products left in the field) are estimated at over 5.5 billion tons per year of potentially valuable biomaterial inputs that could support circular material economies for upcycled products, from textiles to packaging, furniture and building materials. More critically, the rapid loss and degradation of “living soil” cultivated by biological communities at the interface of both systems, represents a growing threat to the fundamental mechanism underpinning the circular renewal of sustainable food resources for the planet. “Soil Sisters” aims to investigate a new paradigm for connecting agricultural waste to large-scale regional material supply chains, in which improving soil nutrition and soil resiliency underpins the design goal of providing cross-sectoral environmental performance through the provision of new biomaterial systems. Focusing on the agricultural, food, and textile material life cycle, the spring 2026 Soil Sisters research seminar will continue to explore and expand a catalog of biobased, non-toxic building materials and biobased dyes. Beginning and ending with agricultural practices, diverse soil health conservation practices have been the central tenet of long-term ecological resilience. For example in Guatemala, as well as across Native American cultures, “three sister” cropping practices have been studied widely as an effective method of enhancing nutrient fixation and maintaining nutrient balances in soil. Not only do such soil conservation practices offer strategies for crop resilience in the face of climate change phenomena, but they also propose material resource programming logics from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Conversely, cyclical practices of layered mulching observed in traditional proka agriculture across Ghana offer important insights for spatializing and timing the degradation of materials at the end of their life cycles and accelerating plant regeneration. Students explore the nurturing and expanding of such multicrop value chains resulting in a class of “soil sister” products, ranging from building materials, biobased dyes to textiles products.

 

ARCH 7002 (22527)

Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen

T 11am-12:50pm

(Required of first-year M.Arch. and available as an elective for M.Arch. II and M.E.D. students.) This course explores the history of Western architectural theory, from 1750 to the present, through the close reading of primary texts. Lectures place the readings in the context of architectural history; the texts are discussed in required discussion sections. Topics include theories of origin, type and character, the picturesque, questions of style and ornament, standardization and functionalism, critiques of modernism, as well as more contemporary debates on historicism, technology, and environmentalism.

 

ARCH 7125 (22535)

David Gissen

W 2-3:50pm

Environment, broadly defined, may be one of the most enduring subjects within modern architectural history and theory – from architectural historical writing on buildings and weather in the 19th century to contemporary architecture histories inspired by environmental humanities. This course examines many of the key themes and methods within architecture histories and theories of environment. These include histories and theories of climate, nature, ecology, regions, ecosystems, urban metabolisms, and material toxicities, among many other topics. We will focus on methods as much as the specific theoretical and practical applications of these ideas, with the goal of developing additional formulations out of them.  

 

ARCH 7132 (23377)

Keller Easterling

Th 11am-12:50pm

With support from Yale’s ASCEND initiative, this seminar shares sessions with Morgan State and other HBCUs to explore precedents and potentials for land reparations in the US. The ownership of land as property has been a central mechanism for generating staggering wealth inequality. The seminar considers a broader history of mutualism, care, maintenance, and kinship that are at the heart of Indigenous, Black, abolitionist, feminist, and anarchist thinking. It pays particular attention to an underexplored, 150-year tradition of Black land cooperatives—from reconstruction to the civil rights era to today. Generating community economies that avoid the automatic harm of financial abstractions, cooperative land holding organs are treated as spatial infrastructures as worthy of public investment as those of concrete and conduit with compounding values that can begin to address the incalculable debt of reparations. Considering reparations and climate change as inseparable, the seminar also studies solidarities to deal with climate injustice at a planetary scale. Guest speakers, shared between MSU and YSOA, strengthen a consortium of HBCUs and prepare to pursue design studios at the northern and southern ends of a proposed spine of existing public land called the ATTTNT. The ATTTNT is created from the Appalachian Trail (AT), the water route of the Trail of Tears (TT) on TVA land, and the Natchez Trace Parkway (NT). Continuous from Maine to the Mississippi, this three-thousand-mile linear formation, often scripted by narratives of white supremacy, here receives another reckoning with the under-told histories of Black and Indigenous resistance and survival.

 

ARCH 8102 (22536)

Joyce Hsiang

W 4-5:50pm

This course is an urban research and design seminar. It explores the role of architecture in the aftermath and afterlives of seismic shifts that have dramatically reshaped societies and ecologies on a planetary scale, whether through loss/extinction or invention/innovation. The course invites students to examine new organizations, forms, spaces, and places that emerge and rehearse ways in which architecture can anticipate or respond. Readings from across disciplines prompt consideration and critique of various approaches including speculation, sci-fi, thought experiments, techno-futurism, world-making, and utopia/dystopia. The course explores text as an architectural project, referencing and generating creative work in response to readings to develop critical stances on the role of architecture. The semester-long research and design exploration Architecture for a World After _____ asks each student to fill in the blank with a subject grounded in the present that is disappearing or (re)appearing. Students experiment with creating drawings, images, films, and/or other novel media to speculate on the perils and possibilities of a world after.

 

ARCH 8106 (22537)

Norma Barbacci

W 2-3:50pm

This seminar explores the evolution of historic preservation from a narrow focus on monumental properties to its broader, more complex, and more inclusive current purview. The course begins by learning about the history of the field of preservation through the understanding of its theoretical roots, definitions, professional practice, and the basics of material conservation. This introduction serves as a preamble to the second part of the course which focuses on the expanding role and potential future of historic preservation as it aligns its objectives with the principles of sustainability, social inclusion, and decolonization.

 

ARCH 8109 (22538)

Warren Fuermann

F 11am-12:50pm

This seminar examines chronologically the history of landscape architecture and country-house architecture in Britain from 1500 to 1900. Topics of discussion include the history of the castle in British architecture and landscape architecture; Italian and French influences on the seventeenth-century British garden; military landscaping; the Palladian country house and British agricultural landscape; Capability Brown’s landscape parks; theories of the picturesque and of the landscape sublime; Romanticism and the psychology of nature; the creation of the public park system; arts and crafts landscape design; and the beginnings of landscape modernism. Comparisons of historical material with contemporary landscape design, where appropriate, are made throughout the term. The collection of the Yale Center for British Art is used for primary visual material, and a trip to England over spring break, partially funded by the School, allows students to visit firsthand the landscape parks studied in this seminar. Limited enrollment.

 

ARCH 8112 (25539) / ENV 638 

Anthony Acciavatti

M 11am-12:50pm

In 1968, the director of the US Agency for International Development, William Gaud, christened the decades-long experiments with agriculture and technology as the “green revolution.” Juxtaposing it with the Red Revolution of the USSR and the White Revolution of the Shah of Iran, record harvests during the Cold War made the Green Revolution as much about food and hunger as it did geopolitics and diplomacy. This seminar explores the origins and development of the Green Revolution through its principal sites of experimentation: laboratories and landscapes. Whether hailed by some as a major turning point in the history of combatting hunger and food insecurity or castigated by others for perpetuating colonial and imperial asymmetries of power and environmental degradation, the legacies of the Green Revolution endure to this day. We attend to the global legacies of this color-coded revolution and how it reshaped the contours of the land, food distribution networks, settlement patterns, and cultures of eating and cooking, as well as reconfigured the habits and habitats of the human subject. Along with weekly readings and assignments that involve eating and cooking, we travel to one of the major laboratories and landscapes of the Green Revolution: India.

 

ARCH 8113 (22540)

Alan Plattus

W 11am-12:50pm

Historically, port cities around the world have played a crucial role as the nodes of connection and exchange for both local and vast global networks of production, trade, culture, and power. Since the industrial revolution, rapid development of new technologies of transport and communication has challenged the planners and developers of these cities to both adapt and innovate, creating new and hybrid spatial typologies and transforming vast areas of urbanized waterfront and rural hinterland. And now, climate change and its impact on coastal and riparian geographies add an additional layer of complexity and challenge. This seminar considers the changing and persistent patterns, functions, and images of port cities, particularly in the context of their regional and global networks, researching, analyzing, and mapping the architectural and spatial manifestations of those systems. Limited enrollment.

 

ARCH 8114 (22541)

Ana Duran

W 9-10:50am

In this seminar, we read the chronicles of the Pizarro-Orellana, Ursúa-Aguirre, and Teixeira expeditions. We also dive into the reports and letters of missionaries who left testimonies related to the Jesuit Provinces of Peru (1568), the New Kingdom of Granada (1611, 1696), and Quito (1696). We oscillate between texts, drawings, and other mediums of representation as we speculate about the spatialities of the past through the window of early colonial documents. Because writings that offer the viewpoint of Amazonians are extremely rare, almost non-existent for this period, we engage—as proxies—the books of first generation mestizo intellectuals such as Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and Diego de Valadés. We also read the English translation of legal documents that were written (using the alphabet) in Maya, Nahuatl, Quechua, Aymara, and other American languages by elite members of First Nations. This allows us to gain insight into how this tumultuous chapter of the history of humanity was experienced by the original peoples and nations of the Americas. Ultimately, the objective of this seminar is to learn from the urban agroecologies of the deep past as we renew our imaginaries of more sustainable and just forms of urbanism today.

 

ARCH 8118 (22542) 

Elihu Rubin

W 2-3:50pm

This is an advanced, interdisciplinary seminar in architectural history, urban planning, vernacular building, the politics of preservation, collective memory, tourism, and, ultimately, urban sustainability. Looking at a broad spectrum of failed or almost-failed cities in the United States and across the globe, this seminar uses the ghost town and its rhythms of development and disinvestment to establish a conceptual framework for contemporary urban patterns and processes. Students develop skills in urban and architectural research methods, visual and formal analysis, effective writing, and critical reasoning. Limited enrollment.

 

ART 6404 (21889)

Kameelah Rasheed

M 2:00-5:00pm

The course title comes from the 2012 English translation of Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva (1973). This course invites us to make work that engages with text and writing and explore the artists who push us to consider new relationships to language. Beyond the page, we explore text practices across various substrates and environments: the browser, the wall, the body, the sky, and the land. We consider legibility, translation, duration, embodiment, quantum physics, and pleasure in generating and studying text-based practices. Classes include opportunities for play, discussions, short lectures, and making. Assignments in this class include one presentation, one summative text-based work, one short essay, and active class participation. In the background of the course, we slowly read Lispector’s Água Viva as a haunt in our study of those who attempt to wrangle language.

 

ART 6432 (21890)

Lili Chin

W 3:30-6:30pm

In this class we will explore nature in contemporary art and the historic world. Within and beyond the context of culture and society, we will consider paradoxes in wild and cultivated environments, and what that means for perceptual encounters. What possibilities can thrive in extreme circumstances? How do elemental forces impact behavior and attitudes? Readings, seminars, screenings and field trips will facilitate discussions around process-based and investigative projects. This course is driven by a sense of play and exploration with invisible forces to reimagine the familiar.

 

EMST 7217 (23432) / HSAR 6617

Catalina Ospina

T 1:30-3:20pm

The era of globalization that connected the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa between 1450 and 1800 seeded the world we live in today. It was also an unprecedented time of colonization projects and artistic media dissemination. Readings and class discussions  explore how objects and materials were transformed and, in turn, transformed this era. We discuss materials such as pearls, silver, gold, ceramics, paper, wood, fibers, resins, and feathers. We center on the latest scholarship on the Spanish colonies while attending to parallel developments in other parts of the world.

 

EMST 8705 (23585) / SPAN 8705

Lisa Voigt

T 3:30-5:20pm

This course focuses on the use of images of and in the “New World” during the first century of European exploration, conquest, and colonization in the Americas. We explore printed illustrations that shaped European perceptions of New World “exoticism” and “barbarism,” as well as indigenous pictorial manuscripts that continued and adapted native visual practices and offered alternative views of the conquest. Besides reading texts by European and indigenous authors in which images played an important role (Columbus, Las Casas, Oviedo, Staden, Léry, Raleigh, Sahagún, Guaman Poma), we study nonalphabetic visual sources such as Nahua codices and maps, and portraits and festive performances of Afro-descendants. We also examine how images of the Americas were disseminated in Europe through copied illustrations, generating clichés and stereotypes—terms originally associated with printing techniques—that contributed to the racism and colonialism that have shaped the modern world. We conclude with a discussion of examples of contemporary films that reimagine the colonial Americas.

 

ENGL 5820 (20336) / FILM 6020 / AMST 6627 / RLST 6600

John Peters and Kathryn Lofton

M 3:30-5:20pm

Media and religion are devices of information and agencies of order. This course proceeds from the possible synonymy of its organizing terms, using as a form of weekly debate the relationship between media and religion. Readings think about how religion and media generate meanings about human doings and their relations with ecological and economic systems while also being constitutive parts of those systems. Students develop projects that allow them to explore a relationship between concept and subject in humanistic study.

 

ENV 613 (23486)

Stephanie Hanes

Time TBA

This course is an advanced nonfiction writing workshop with a focus in journalistic storytelling, designed to help environmental scholars and practitioners write for a broad, lay audience. In other words, this is not just a class for writers—although those with an interest in journalism will find it useful. This is a course for students who recognize the importance of reaching broad audiences in a time of rapidly transforming climate, technology, science, and culture. We learn and practice the tools of journalism—the ability to listen, communicate, research, capture hearts, spread ideas, and explain complexity— and study writings that exemplify these attributes. Our focus topic in this course is climate and other environmental changes, with an intentional look to the global south as well as the US and global north. Students write multiple pieces of their own, from short research “explainers” to reported profiles to first person reportage. By the end of the course, students have refined at least one of their pieces to a quality to submit for publication.

 

ENV 696 (23491) 

Gary Dunning and Mark Ashton

Humans have interacted with forests since time immemorial. The evolution of humanity’s connections to forests illuminates how we interact with nature in a changing climate today. By understanding our past, we can contextualize our present situation and inform our future decision-making. Yale Forest Forum is proud to host a trilogy of seminars covering the inextricably linked histories of people and forests. In this first installment, the seminar offers a global view of forest practices from pre-historic to the pre-modern period. Speakers survey various forest regions that represent different forest cultures and management systems, ranging from swidden farming of forest peoples in the Amazon and Southeast Asia, to ancient forest-based civilizations such as the Maya, to medieval forests of Europe and Mughal India. Students (1) gain an understanding of the origins of pre-industrial forest practices worldwide, (2) connect people to place and practice through pre-industrial forestry, and (3) consider how we know what we know about these different peoples and their ways of interacting with forests.

 

ENV 775 (23206)

James Diamond

Time TBA

This course covers the basics of federal Indian law. It does not address the substantive content of tribal law. Tribal law is a specialized study arising from the exercise of the legal authority that the tribes retain. This course is designed to lay the groundwork for a deep understanding of what kinds of sovereignty Indian nations may exercise within the framework of our legal system. Normally, courses of this type begin with an historical exploration of the foundations of the relations between Indian and non-Indian peoples. Instead, we begin with questions that are current and sketch out, roughly, where we are now. Typically, we start with cases pending before or recently decided by the Supreme Court. We use the Marshall Trilogy to build from the present back to the origins to see how the doctrines reflect the positive aspects of the legal expression of contact between Europe and the native nations of the Western hemisphere as well as the more malign aspects. We also situate the doctrinal evolution of federal Indian law with the struggle over colonialism as expressed in the insular cases. We do not neglect the history; it proves critical for understanding the ways in which federal Indian law is sui generis in domestic jurisprudence, but we see how that history is always haunted by the specter of colonialism, extra-legality, and finally, international legal norms. Every student must complete the discussion question requirements to sit for the examination or to submit a paper.

 

ENV 796 (21722)

Michael Dove

Time TBA

Advanced graduate seminar on the “post-humanist” turn toward multi-species ethnography. Section I, introduction to the course. Section II, perspectivism: ontological theory and multi-species ethnography; human consciousness and the environment; and mimesis in human-prey relations. Section III, entanglements: translating indigenous knowledge; the history of natural history; and the politics of environmentalism. Section IV, metaphors: non-human imagery in political discourses; and geologic/volcanic imagery. Section V, student selections of readings; and student presentations of their seminar papers. Section VI, conclusion: plants as teachers; and a lecture by the course TF. Three hour lecture/seminar. Enrollment capped.

 

ENV 951 (21746) 

Anthony Leiserowitz

Time TBA

Strategic communication is a powerful means of achieving an organization’s mission, especially when informed by insights into human behavior and social systems. By the end of this course, students are able to develop communication strategies and apply insights from the social and behavioral sciences to improve the effectiveness of their communication campaigns. Enrollment limited to twelve.

 

ENV 975 (21751)

Justin Farrell

Time TBA

This course develops students’ skills in writing and publishing, with a mandatory field trip at its core. Students complete a self-driven writing project aimed at publication, with work both before and after the trip. The course welcomes projects from any field, including but not limited to social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. The course fulfills the M.E.M. capstone but is open to all students. In prior years, students have published scholarly journals articles, op-eds in reputable news outlets (e.g. NYT in 2024), thesis chapters, book manuscripts, documentaries, podcasts, and creative non-fiction essays. The course emphasizes narrative craft for both scholarly and general public writing.

 

HIST 6000 (24495) / CLSS 7000 / ANTH 5331 / EALL 7730 / HSAR 6564 / JDST 6553 / NELC 5330 / RLST 8030

Malina Buturovic and Giulia Accornero

M 9:25-11:15am

Can an environment shape the habits and behaviors of its dwellers? And if so, could one map human difference across different latitudes, climates, and winds? In this class, we will explore how ‘scientific’ and vernacular theories of environmental influence shaped the construction of human difference in the pre-modern world. We approach this question through both historical and historiographical lenses, following the red thread of environmental determinism—the ideology that the environment determines physical attributes and mental characteristics of human and non-human animals—across discourses such as medicine, music theory, natural philosophy, geography, ethnography, cartography, astronomy, and physiognomy. 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.

 

Craig Buckley

W 9:25-11:15am

Architecture’s capacity to represent a world and to intervene in the world has historically depended on techniques of visualization. This seminar draws on a range of media theoretical approaches to examine the complex and historically layered repertoire of visual techniques within which architecture operates. We approach architecture not as an autonomous entity reproduced by media, but as a cultural practice advanced and debated through media and mediations of various kinds (visual, social, material, and financial). If questions of media have played a key role in architectural theory and history over the past three decades, recent scholarship in the field of media theory has insisted on the architectural, infrastructural, and environmental dimensions of media. The seminar is organized around nine operations whose technical and historical status will be examined through concrete examples. To do so, the seminar presents a range of differing approaches to media and reflects on their implications for architectural and spatial practices today. Key authors include Giuliana Bruno, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Beatriz Colomina, Robin Evans, Friedrich Kittler, Bruno Latour, Reinhold Martin, Shannon Mattern, Marshall McLuhan, Felicity Scott, and Bernhard Siegert, among others.

 

HSAR 6680 (23031)

Tim Barringer

Th 1:30-3:20pm

This seminar examines artists’ innovations amidst the commercial ambitions of the East India Company at major ports and centers of trade across Asia. Within the period of the company’s relentless pursuit of profits, artists trained in India, China, and Britain forged relationships across cultures and experimented with materials and techniques to produce striking artworks. We interrogate the relationship between these artists and a corporation. The course asks whether “style” links such disparate arts through subjects of colonial interest—including portraits and ethnographic types, landscapes and architectural drawings, plants and animals—or if the description holds only through the terminology of “Company” art that developed as the British empire waned. Students engage with these arts in the exhibition Painters, Ports & Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1760–1830 at the Yale Center for British Art and on two funded field trips to Brown University and to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

 

HSAR 6835 (23032) / MDVL 6535

Jacqueline Jung

Th 1:30-3:20pm

This advanced graduate seminar explores issues pertaining to the art and architecture of medieval Europe that can only be fully investigated on site. Readings, discussions, and short presentations by students in class meetings during the first half of the semester lay the theoretical and historical groundwork for a trip to Europe during spring break. Post-travel meetings will take up additional scholarly readings on the sites, and allow us to consider how our own encounters open up new questions and insights. Students will present original scholarship, based on their own research and first-hand observations, in presentations at the end of the term. Final papers of approximately 20 pages will be due at the usual time at the end of the semester. The theme for spring 2026 is Chartres Cathedral: Art and Architecture in Gothic France. Our main focus in the great pilgrimage cathedral of Notre Dame in Chartres, which stands out for its almost complete retention of its late-twelfth and early-thirteenth-century architecture, sculpture, and stained glass. It is the best surviving example of an “integrated” Gothic church in France, and since the late nineteenth century has generated a deep, broad, and conceptually rich literature. We will spend three full days exploring that building, getting to know its many elements and levels both inside and out, the changing lighting conditions that affected its appearance over the course of the day, and the processional routes that moved liturgical objects through the (small) town. We will begin our trip with four days in Paris. There we will visit two key buildings that were important precedents for Gothic Chartres Cathedral: the abbey church of St-Denis and the newly restored cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. We will also visit the Sainte-Chapelle, an important point of comparison for the stained glass program. At the Louvre we will examine some of the sculptural capitals from the Chartres choir screen and other related works of sculpture and metalwork. The Musée de Cluny offers a treasure-trove of early and high Gothic monumental and luxury arts that will enhance our understanding of Chartres. Students will emerge with an excellent understanding of the range and sophistication of ecclesiastical arts in the French crownland at an explosive moment of artistic and architectural experimentation. This class is limited to eight students. Priority is given to history of art students and medieval studies students who have done graduate-level coursework in some part of the medieval field. Reading knowledge of French is required and of German strongly recommended.

 

Ryan Darr

M 1:30-3:20pm

A common critique of contemporary societies is that they do not rightly value the natural, more-than-human world. This argument is especially common in environmental ethics, which has produced many arguments about the intrinsic value of nonhuman creatures. Related arguments about misvaluation are also found among economists concerned with ecological issues. Yet ethicists and economists often mean very different things by value. This course explores the complex and interdisciplinary set of questions surrounding the value of the more-than-human world. It incorporates the work of self and social understanding, self and social criticism, and imagining and assessing alternatives to contemporary practices. Topics include the nature of value and valuing (individual and collective), the distinction between intrinsic and instrumental value, green capitalism and neoliberal conservation, pricing ecosystem services and natural capital accounting, ecomarxist analysis, gift economies, and theological visions of economy and value.

 

REL 964 (22181)

David Mahan

Time TBA

This course explores the literary-theological and sociological facets of the apocalyptic, primarily through modern works of the imagination. Sessions begin with an introduction to various definitions and ideas of the apocalyptic, with special reference to biblical literature in the Hebrew Scriptures as well as the New Testament. From these distinctively theological/religious visions, in which God is the primary actor and God’s people figure as the main subjects, the course explores how that framework for the apocalyptic has undergone significant transformations in the literary imagination of late-modern, particularly Western, societies. Through such prose works as A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the course considers how literary portrayals of apocalypse contemplate themes that resonate with significant theological concerns. Area V.