Faculty
Ann Shafer
MArch, Rhode Island School of Design. PhD, Harvard University. Shafer is a visiting writer, artist, and art and architectural historian with a slightly irreverent and decidedly decolonial perspective on historical visual and spatial culture. The foundation of her own research is in the Middle East and North Africa, where she has worked for two decades. Her current project is a book on a very famous Islamic manuscript and its institutional discourses. She has previously taught at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Rhode Island School of Design. SLC, 2026–
Undergraduate Courses 2026-2027
Art History
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Open, Small Lecture—Fall
ARTH 2038
This course will pose questions about the ontology of architecture and our role in engaging its global expressions. Focusing on provocative case studies in a lecture-discussion format, this survey of architectural history will draw material from antiquity to the present, from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific Islands. Students will learn how to describe architectural material properties, siting, function, and experience, and how to interpret them through larger dynamics of subsistence practices, trade, conquest, and ideological implementation. Subverting previous canonical approaches to architectural history, the goal of this course is not to identify and memorize a series of period styles, but to explore the social realities of architecture, and what it means to grapple with a culture that is different from your own. Through challenging analytical comparisons, primary texts, and hands-on exercises, students will learn that our categorization and interpretation of the other cultures is often heavily laden with assumptions. We will ask difficult questions. As we free ourselves from linear, binary, and anachronistic conceptions of nature, divinity, time, and purpose, we will become well-situated to imagine and respect other spatial realities, and of course, to reshape our own.
Faculty