Professor Barton, is also the University Architect, where he is involved in the long range campus architectural and building planning, helping to envision and coordinate architectural studies for new structures and renovations to existing structures. Overall, his job is to imagine how Brown might look later into the 21st Century.

The courses he's teaching in our department reflect this interest in visionary architectural thinking. In Spring 2020 Professor Barton offered his first class, "Memory, Monuments and Identity in American Urbanism." This timely course considered issues of memory and identity in the American urban landscape as a constructed spatial phenomenon which can be experienced in the built environment. Students explored the relationship between memorial, identity, and  monument, focusing on the means and methods with which groups without access to traditional forms of patronage construct the space(s) that commemorate the events, people, and practices which define their presence.

This summer Professor Barton will offer an equally timely class, "Design and Wellness in the Age of Pandemics." Among the subjects studies, the course will look at urban planning strategies proposed to address fears about immigration and urban density, the effect of treatment protocols for infectious diseases like tuberculosis (hygiene, fresh air, sunlight) on the evolution of the work of modernist architects like le Corbusier, Richard Neutra and others, and the design, planning and policy responses to both the 1918 influenza pandemic and the current Covid-19 pandemic.

Besides welcoming Professor Barton, our faculty has grown to include post-doctoral Research Associate Jessica Stair, and visiting instructors Marina Tyquiengco and Julian van der Schulenburg. Each of these faculty allow the department to significantly broaden the scope of offerings. Professor Stair teaches courses on colonial Latin America, Professor Tyquiengco teaches Indiginous art after 1990 in Australia, Canada and the US, and Professor van der Schulenburg teaches architectural studio courses in our new architecture concentration.