Professor D. Fairchild Ruggles

Thurs, 5:30 - 8:20 PM

The seminar introduces students to the historiography of architecture and landscape by exploring diverse approaches used by historians to understand and interpret the built environment. Reading key texts and attending the weekly MCT lectures, we will investigate conventions of the recent past as well as newer interpretive frameworks and theoretical positions in order to understand a range of possible approaches to historical research and writing. As such, we will focus not on the content of history but instead on the historians’ methods as applied to such histories, asking:

• What types of sources do historians consult?
• What questions do historians ask and how do they formulate them?
• What interpretive tools and strategies do historians use?
• How is history constructed and what theories and values inform those constructions?
• How does the work of historians of the built environment depart from or converge with that in other disciplines, such as anthropology, geography, history, and philosophy?