Perhaps more than ever before, contemporary designers are concerned with the intersections of natural science and utilitarian form. Currently explored in “Nature,” the Cooper Hewitt’…

Over the past few decades, digital technologies have changed our world fromhow we communicate to how we conduct research to even how we understand what …

The development of modern design is in many ways intertwined with the rise of consumer capitalism. But what happens to design when market forces …

In recent decades, art history’s embrace of perspectives from material culture studies on the one hand and economic and social history on the other …

This course is a research seminar that will enable students to undertake in-depth study of the objects and sources to be included in the upcoming …

This course will examine key concepts in material culture that require us to look at objects through the scientist’s lens. Topics will include: patina …

The rich findings of the Cairo Geniza supply unparalleled data concerning the material culture and everyday life of Jews, Muslims, and Christians, who lived around …

This seminar surveys the cultural and material histories of indigenous textiles in the greater American Southwest, including Navajo, Pueblo, and Hispanic weaving traditions. Through historical …

The emergence of fully mobile lifeways is one of the most distinctive features of the Eurasian steppe belt of the first millennium BC. Current scholarship …

Embedded in the discipline of Islamic art history is the study of imperial histories and thus of global contact. This graduate seminar will focus on …

This seminar examines the development of the changing meanings of technology and of the most prominent scholarly approaches to the history of technology as a …

This two-semester, team-taught course introduces incoming students to major historical developments in the decorative and applied arts, design, and material culture from antiquity to the …

This seminar focuses on the Colonial Revival in the United States, a complex cultural phenomenon succinctly described as “national retrospection.” Chronologically, the course ranges from …

Antiquarianism, the pre-modern scholarly practice of collecting and interpreting relics from the distant past, emerged in the eleventh century in Song China. In China, it …

Over the past four decades a number of sensational archaeological finds have drawn scholarly attention to the long neglected Kitan-Liao Empire in northern China. The …

This course traces the development of furnishing and dress textiles in Europe and the United States from the highly naturalistic and revival styles of the …

This course will introduce the art and material culture of the inhabitants of one third of the surface of the Earth—Oceania— focusing on their …

Our culture’s ability to manufacture almost any plastic form—ranging from Jeff Koons steel bunnies to chocolate ones—can numb us to the magic …