Dear Friends of the NYU M.A. in Historical and Sustainable Architecture,
Greetings from New York and London, where our students are making good progress toward earning their degrees, despite the challenges we have faced in this uncertain year. Our faculty have worked hard to adapt their courses and site visits to deliver our curriculum this year, and with the lifting of restrictions in the UK we hope to soon emerge from the covid-19 pandemic. We very much look forward to returning to our normal schedule this spring and next fall with our class of 2023, for which we are now accepting applications.
We write today to announce new blog posts on our web pages about recent faculty work. Our faculty are the heart of our program, offering the intellectual and professional perspectives that inform the training students receive on our program. You can find news about two of our faculty members, Neil Bingham and Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, at this link.
You can also read more about Professors Bingham and Longstaffe-Gowan, as well as our other faculty. Please contact us with any questions at: histsust@nyu.edu
Ancient Egyptian art is full of bodies, a fact that has not been lost on modern Western audiences who have long delighted in mummies, reliefs of kings “walking like an Egyptian”, and the miniature proportions of shabti figurines, workers for the afterlife who were included by the hundred in tombs. This talk will argue that the bodily preoccupation of ancient Egyptian art is one reason why it has proven unusually appealing to modern audiences; we have until now, however, received Egyptian art through the lens of our own bodily understandings, which has led to problematic scholarly interpretations that sometimes unconsciously reproduce the modern body politics of racist, sexist, and colonial modes of thought. This talk will examine several case studies of the modern “translation” of bodies in ancient Egyptian art and demonstrate how the nexus between ancient and modern body worlds continues to affect our understanding of Egyptian artistic production.
The Great Mosque of Damascus, photograph by Alain George.
The Great Mosque of Damascus is an iconic monument of world architecture, and the oldest mosque still standing in something close to its original state. It was built at the end of the first Islamic century on a site previously occupied by a Roman temple of Jupiter and a church of John the Baptist. This lecture will explore this pre-Islamic past, the political crisis that erupted with Damascene Christians upon the foundation of the mosque, and the aesthetic values that underpinned the Umayyad monument. It will be followed by a conversation with Finbarr Barry Flood, author of The Great Mosque of Damascus: Studies on the Makings of an Umayyad Visual Culture (2000).
Alain Fouad George is I.M. Pei Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wolfson College. He was previously a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh (2007-17). His research focuses on early Islam, especially Umayyad and Abbasid art, and Arabic calligraphy. He is the author of The Umayyad Mosque of Damascus: Art, Faith and Empire in Early Islam (2021), Power, Patronage and Memory in Early Islam: Perspectives on Umayyad Elites (2018, co-edited with Andrew Marsham), Midad: The Private and Intimate Lives of Arabic Calligraphy (2017), and The Rise of Islamic Calligraphy (2010). In 2010, he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize.
Date: Wednesday, March 2nd Time: 12:30-2:30pm Location: Online
This event will take place as a live Webinar at 12:30pm EST (New York time). To register as an attendee, please use the following link: https://nyu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_EdzUBTbjTG-jP8tkULnSYg Only registered attendees will be able to access this event.
Silsila: Center for Material Histories is an NYU center dedicated to material histories of the Islamicate world. Each semester we hold a thematic series of lectures and workshops, which are open to the public. Details of the Center can be found at:
A silk weaving (shaʿrbafi) workshop in Kashan, January 2010
This talk explores the mass production of architecture and textiles in a provincial urban center in Iran in the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries. It argues that a group of silk weaving (shaʿrbafi) workshops in Kashan were built based on a modular design in a short period by local elites to revive the mass production of plain silk fabrics as part of a city-wide economic and urban development after a devastating earthquake in 1778. This study contributes to the scholarship that reexamines the centrality of Europe in global history in the age of commercialization and industrialization as well as dichotomies such as industrial versus pre-industrial. This study extensively relies on material culture, architectural, and ethnographic evidence to discuss a deliberate standardization strategy in designing weaving workshops and looms and an efficient division of labor in Kashan in this period. Finally, it argues that such efforts shifted from silk weaving to other industries in Kashan due to a set of interrelated factors such as a global silkworm disease epidemic and a “wool turn” in the Iranian elite fashion in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Nadar Sayadi is a postdoctoral fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His research comprises modes of production and consumption in the early modern world at the intersection of the built environment and material culture in the Global South. His current research focuses on workspaces and textiles in the Islamic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With an academic and professional background in historic preservation and architectural design, Nader has worked, conducted research, and taught in Tehran, Milwaukee, Austin, and New York City since 2010. Nader has published with the International Journal of Islamic Architecture and Smarthistory. His upcoming publication is a book chapter in Stories of Immigrant Labor in Global Textile and Clothing Production by Bloomsbury Publishing.
Date: Wednesday, February 23rd Time: 12:30-2:30pm Location: Online
This event will take place as a live Webinar at 12:30pm EST (New York time). To register as an attendee, please use the following link: https://nyu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_TGkaih5CRbqWQYkh7J7LMQ Only registered attendees will be able to access this event.
Silsila: Center for Material Histories is an NYU center dedicated to material histories of the Islamicate world. Each semester we hold a thematic series of lectures and workshops, which are open to the public. Details of the Center can be found at:
We are pleased to announce the application launch and return to on-site teaching for the College’s summer abroad programs and courses, including CAS Urban Design in London planned for Monday, May 30 – Saturday, June 25, 2022.
Led by Professor Mosette Broderick, students in a variety of disciplines converge in the British capital to gain practical knowledge in preservation, infrastructure, transportation, adaptive reuse, and other topics related to urban planning and architectural practice. Visits throughout the city and day trips outside London to explore the English countryside are planned, too!
All participants enroll in ARTH-UA 9650.005 Exploring British Architecture with the option to enroll in ARTH-UA 9804 Independent Study with Professor Broderick.
Students who participate in Urban Design in London benefit from:
Exploring a discipline in a real-world setting;
Mentorship opportunity with NYU faculty in a small cohort environment;
Although the Arts and Science College Learning Center has offered subject-specific assistance in the past and continues to do so in biology, chemistry, math, languages and the like, in recent years our own Department has taken the lead in providing art history-specific tutoring to its undergraduates. The program kicked off in October 2008 and, according to our students’ feedback, has proven to be a great success.
A tutor is available via Zoom on Mondays through Fridays 12.30 pm to 2:00 pm. In-person tutoring can also be arranged. Contact op422@nyu.edu to schedule an appointment.
Emily Hallman is a first year master’s student at the Institute of Fine Arts, focusing on Northern Renaissance art with interests in portrait miniatures and devotional arts. Emily completed her B.F.A. in Art History with a minor in Preservation Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2021. She has previously worked as a Gallery Representative at the Ray Ellis Gallery in Savannah, as well as serving as a Docent at the Telfair Museums and a Writing Tutor at SCAD. Emily is available Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm.
Clara Maria Apostolatos is a first-year MA student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Originally from Caracas, she completed her BA in Art History at Columbia in 2020. Her research interests include modern and contemporary art of Latin America, Institutional Critique, and the politics of testimony. She co-curated the exhibition “Kenneth Kemble and Silvia Torras: The Formative Years, 1956-63” and held positions at the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Sapar Contemporary Art Gallery, Artbook / D.A.P., and the Center for Italian Modern Art. Clara is available Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 12:30 pm – 2:00pm.
RSVP Wednesday, February 16, 2021 Livestream at 6:30 PM ET
Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism examines the creative manifestations of black modernism, and explicates how tropicality functioned as a key unifying element in African Diasporic art. In this book, I argue that crucial artworks of the Caribbean modern art movement and of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as performance traditions ought not be viewed as being particular to their geopolitical parameters but rather as part of a larger African Diasporic mission. Given this reality, I contend that a discourse of internationalism existed in the realm of visual art and performance. By examining the art of Aaron Douglas and Wifredo Lam, as well as the performances of Josephine Baker, Maya Angelou and early twentieth-century Carnival masqueraders in Trinidad, I explicate how their representations of tropicalia are reflective of the unique yet complex relationship that black people of these respective regions have with the terrain they inhabit – land on which many of the enslaved ancestors labored. Despite this traumatic legacy, these creative works nonetheless show how this land is revered by their inhabitants who recognize them for their beauty, not with any intention to transform it but rather to accept it. Ultimately, this book seeks to illuminate the desire for early twentieth-century black Atlantic peoples to engender a sense of belonging to the citizenry, and a particular kind of claim to the land that they inhabit, which speaks to a desire for home.Samantha A. Noël is an Associate Professor of Art History and the Hawkins Ferry Endowed Chair in Modern and Contemporary Art at Wayne State University. She received her B.A. in Fine Art from Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y., and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from Duke University. Her research interests revolve around the history of art, visual culture and performance of the Black Diaspora. She has published on black modern and contemporary art and performance in journals such as Small Axe, Third Text, and Art Journal.
Looking for a future path? Love old buildings? Why not make them new again? NYU’s London-based M.A. Program provides an immersion in adaptive reuse and sustainable building practice. Come learn about the program at our Spring open house, featuring presentations about our faculty and curriculum, admissions information for 2022-23 and a discussion of career opportunities in the field. Program directors, faculty, and alumni will be there to discuss the program and answer your questions. Applications for 2022-23 are due March 1, 2022.
Fields of Vision 