Topological Studies Program
To understand how ideas and visual culture have historically shaped human consciousness, you will take a number of on-site residencies throughout the course of study. These aren't just field trips—they are intensive learning experiences that reveal how geography, history, and culture intersect to create new ways of thinking.
Curriculum as Cartography
Each residency location functions as what we call a "topological node"—a place where you can examine the layered relationship between art and ideas across three dimensions: the site's historical significance, its contemporary cultural role, and its connections to other places you'll visit. Together, these sites form a non-linear, geographically distributed narrative: a braid of philosophical intensities rather than a chronological or cultural sequence. The pedagogical objective is to immerse doctoral candidates in sites where conceptual systems emerge, unravel, or transform, so that philosophy is engaged not only through texts, but through spatial and historical atmospheres.
The number, location, and duration of residencies varies from year to year, ranging from three days to three weeks. Residencies are scheduled during summer and winter breaks, allowing for deep immersion in each location's unique offerings.
To learn about upcoming residencies, please refer to the academic calendar.
Past Residencies
Rome
Rome grounds you in the foundations of Western civilization, where you'll explore layers of history from ancient kingdom through empire to Christian center of power. The "Eternal City" shows you how past and present coexist—ancient ruins integrate seamlessly into daily life while contemporary art galleries thrive alongside archaeological sites. Together with Visiting Faculty and Core Faculty, you will consider the uneasy and shifting relationship between ancient history and modern interpretations, and the uses (and abuses) of it. For example, visits to key archaeological sites of the ancient city (Roman Forum, Palatino, Pantheon, Ara Pacis) will be intertextualized with the remaining buildings and monuments of fascist Rome (the EUR quarter and its museums), as well as with contemporary street art, modern art museums, religious buildings, and the city’s striated topology.
Spannocchia Castle, Tuscany
Spannocchia Castle, Tuscany moves us forward and backwards in time: from this medieval estate and working farm that balances feudal traditions with ecological sustainability, we shift to nearby Siena, an important urban banking center in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance periods, experiencing the birth of middle-class capitalism and Renaissance culture. Key sites include the Santa Maria della Scala museum and the Cathedral in Siena. trips to Arezzo and its environs (Monterchi and Borgo San Sepolcro) will introduce you to the site-specific paintings of one of the most important Renaissance artists, Piero della Francesca, and include a visit to the house of Giorgio Vasari, the author of the famous “Lives of the Artists.” At Spannocchia, you will take seminars and lectures on the ever-changing question of the artist-philosopher, meet world-renowned Visiting Faculty, and learn how to develop and present your own research to a community of learners.
Venice
Venice reveals early globalization through its history as a maritime power connecting East and West, and its hegemonic role on the Adriatic sea at the time of its existence as an autonomous city-state. Here, identity wears masks not to deceive but to express the multiplicity beneath essence. The contemporary city drifts, rots, reflects, resists. You will engage with philosophy and art not through abstract concepts, but through veiling, theatricality, and the circular strolling on its labyrinthine streets. You'll see how Renaissance flows into Baroque while experiencing the city's current role as a global art capital during the Venice Biennale. IDSVA participates in the prestigious Biennale Sessions program, and you'll stay at the renowned Vittore Branca Center at the Cini Foundation with access to world-class research facilities.
Athens
Athens, in the common imagination, stands at the supposed “origin” of Western thought, although its true offering is not solidity, but fracture. The Socratic question, the tragic disjunction, the democratic paradox: Athens is the site where metaphysics begins to weaken itself. It is the mother of categories and their first undoing. The city connects you to both the roots of Western philosophy and what came before it. Beyond classical Greek heritage, you'll explore Byzantine and Ottoman influences alongside today's vibrant contemporary art scene. The city links to other IDSVA sites, revealing connections between European thought and its origins in North Africa and India. You'll visit the Acropolis Museum, Ancient Delphi, and contemporary venues like EMST.
Berlin
Berlin is the archive of modernity’s crisis: the wreckage of Enlightenment, the ashes of ideology, the ghosts of failed systems. But it is also the city of restarting thought, of dialectics re-entering the world through the fissures of its own collapse. It provides a reflective space for examining both the ambitions and failures of modern reason. While in residency, you will focus on German philosophy and aesthetics (Idealism, Dialectical critique, memory and history, negative philosophy), while confronting the city's complex 20th-century history. You'll see how Enlightenment ideals evolved, were challenged, and were reconstructed after devastating historical ruptures. Sites range from the Alte Nationalgalerie to contemporary art venues such as Berlinische Galerie, Neue Nationalgalerie and independent art galleries.
New York City
New York City stands as an example of a contemporary city-state where the contradictions, dynamism, and energy of post-industrial culture bears the traces of its glorious 20th-century art and architecture. As arguably the capital of modernism in the United States and beyond, New York is a site of manifold cultural expressions characteristic of its “melting pot” complexity. You’ll experience it through its vibrant street life, and unparalleled art collections at MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Met, and contemporary art spaces in Chelsea and other neighborhoods. In addition to doing fieldwork, you will also attend the annual Commencement and related festivities, where lectures by honorary degree recipients demonstrate what it means to practice art and philosophy along new and unprecedented lines of thought.
Mexico City
Mexico City is a volcanic palimpsest. Indigenous worlds, colonial violence, utopian futures, all layered in discontinuous strata. It is not fusion but friction that generates its philosophical heat. Here, to think is to reconceive Western universals, to see the dramatization of revolutionary ideas, and to engage in postcolonial critique. The multi-layered city brings pre-Columbian indigenous cultures into dialogue with contemporary art, architecture, and various cultural traditions. You'll trace connections from ancient Teotihuacán through the Mexican Revolution and Muralist Movement to today's artistic responses to colonization's ongoing effects. Key visits include the Museo de Antropología, the Templo Mayor and Museum, Casa Azul (Frida Kahlo Museum), Museo de Bellas Artes, and Trotsky's house.
Madrid and Marrakech
Madrid and Marrakech represent IDSVA's expansion beyond Eurocentric perspectives. This combined residency examines the Arab conquest of Spain, medieval "Convivencia" between Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities exemplified by the city of Toledo, and the subsequent Reconquista and colonial expansion. Madrid is a city of archives, but its knowledge is bound in excess, contradiction, ornament. Spanish Baroque is not just style, it is strategy, and sometimes subversion. As such, Madrid is a locus for studying how philosophical systems are implicated in political conquest, and how aesthetics may also function as critique, primarily through visits to museums like the Prado and Reina Sofia.
In Marrakech, philosophy is not sculpted in stone or written in abstraction. Time here is not linear but cyclical, caravan-like, anchored in orality, mysticism, and market rhythm. Its philosophical significance lies in oral traditions, spiritual lineages, and nomadic temporalities. All this challenges logocentric assumptions by foregrounding affective and performative dimensions of cognition. You'll explore indigenous Berber culture, Islamic artistic traditions, and contemporary African art venues.