PhD Program

Louis Nelson is Professor of Architectural History and the Vice Provost for Academic Outreach in the Office of the Provost. He is a specialist in the built environments of the early modern Atlantic world, with published work on the American South, the Caribbean, and West Africa. His current research engages the spaces of enslavement in West Africa and in the Americas, working to document and interpret the buildings and landscapes that shaped the trans-Atlantic slave trade. He has a second collaborative project working to understand the University of Virginia as a landscape of slavery.

Following the completion of his PhD, Mr. Huang first served as a research fellow at Cornell University and then came to teach full-time here at the University. Mr. Huang's courses include a survey of World Buddhist architecture, a seminar on urban development in East Asia since World War II, and East-West architecture. His research interests focus on the cross-cultural issues in architecture and architectural interactions between the East and the West. His course of comparative architecture is an effort to explore a comparative methodology in architectural history.

Tyler Jo Smith (Professor, Department of Art) is a Classical Archaeologist who specializes in ancient Greek figure-decorated pottery, and images of performance and ritual in Greek and Roman art.

I study the theological, philosophical, and scientific ideas that informed the creative decisions of artists living in eastern and western medieval cultures from the third to fifteenth centuries. Recent and forthcoming publications explore the intersection of art and science manifest by astronomical and philosophical illuminated manuscripts. Primary research interests include Carolingian manuscript illumination and late-Gothic painting at the Bohemian court in Prague.