Gothic Aryan: Viollet-le-Duc and the Museums of the Trocadéro
A lecture by Risham Majeed (Ithaca College)

Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc is widely celebrated as a draughtsman, architect, and restorer of medieval buildings. A national hero in France, Viollet-le-Duc tends to be plucked out of the complex nexus of colonialism and nationalism which molded much of his thinking. Indeed, Viollet-le-Duc’s friendship with Arthur de Gobineau, who wrote the Essay on the Inequality of the Races, is understudied given that Gobineau’s theories of race inflected the architect-scholar’s thinking from the 1850s until his death in 1878. Such theories of racial development allowed comparisons between the “primitive” nature of the medieval and the “primitive” quality assigned to the art newly introduced to Western Europe by colonization. In this lecture, Risham Majeed examines how medieval sculpture came to be racialized and understood as “primitive” and “originary” through Viollet-le-Duc’s design for its display in the museums of the Trocadéro Palace (1878–1937).

A Lee B. Anderson Memorial Lecture

March 18, 2026 at 6pm

38 West 86th Street, BGC Lecture Hall