This seminar examines how ancient Roman place-making, visual culture, and landscape practices have been invoked, appropriated, and reworked in North American thought, design, and visual history. Framing Rome as both a material and conceptual resource, the course foregrounds counter-histories and questions of agency, ownership, and power: Who shapes the land, and who claims the classical past?

Through weekly readings, discussion, and close study of sites and objects, we will consider how Roman precedents have informed–and been contested within–modern landscapes, from plantations to public parks and cemeteries. Attention will be given to the ways classical forms have been mobilized to authorize political projects, erase or naturalize labor, and articulate racial and cultural difference, as well as how artists and designers have unsettled or reimagined these inheritances.

Topics include:
• Interpretations and adaptations of classical visual traditions by artists, thinkers, and designers from diverse backgrounds, with case studies such as Edmonia Lewis.
• Neoclassicism in public space, including debates over the display and recontextualization of figures such as Robert E. Lee and Marcus Aurelius in civic monuments and parks.
• Comparative histories of agricultural labor and land use in Roman and early American contexts.
• The influence of Roman landscape design and horticultural practice on American gardens and designed landscapes.
• Legacies of Roman surveying and land division (centuriation) in mapping and land organization in the United States.
• Imperial imaginaries and the representation of cultural difference in Neoclassical civic art and monuments.
• The adaptation of ancient Mediterranean and Roman visual motifs in American funerary landscapes, with a focus on cemeteries.

Class sessions will incorporate visits to Mount Auburn Cemetery (via public transportation), the Harvard Art Museums, and the Harvard Map Collection.