Critical Issues in Heritage Studies

Heritage conservation is rarely just a technical question of how to fix old buildings — it's a contested practice tangled up in politics, identity, tourism economies, climate risk, and whose memory gets preserved. This graduate seminar treats those tensions as the actual subject matter, working through the intellectual history of conservation and then pressing on contemporary debates where values, communities, and policy collide. You'll read across the major handbooks in the field, write four homeworks and give two presentations building toward a final essay, and leave able to argue your own position on heritage decisions rather than just describe them.