The department offers an extensive curriculum in Islamic art and Architecture and in the modern art and architecture of the Middle East at the graduate and undergraduate levels. The program is supervised by Nuha N. N. Khoury who established the field at UCSB.

We define the art and  architecture of Islam as including the cultural and creative output of different historical groups in diverse parts of the world from the 7th to the 18th centuries. The new curriculum in modern art and architecture includes the landscapes of colonialism and orientalism, as well as contemporary architectural, artistic, and exhibiting practices. Undergraduate courses include introductory surveys and focused explorations of specific periods in art and architecture, as well as thematic and comparative frameworks in the visual arts, such as Image and Imagination. Graduate seminars are thematic and varied in content. They cover topics as diverse as Re-constructed Cities (on Beirut as the city of the 21st century), Cities & Texts, (on the transformative role of monumental writing in public space), Ornament, and Women & Children First (the art of nationalism in the modern Arab world).

Our curriculum benefits from exceptional opportunities available at UCSB for language training (in Arabic and Persian) and from the presence of related specialties in such disciplines as history, religious studies, the Medieval Studies program, the Architecture and Environment program, and the Center for Middle East Studies (CMES) on our campus. The CMES sponsors lectures, annual conferences and film screenings. Graduate students of Islamic art and architecture can benefit substantially from the Foreign Language Area Studies grants (FLAS) administered by CMES.

Students are encouraged to make use of the archival and art collections at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Diego Museum, the Getty Center, and other institutions in southern California. Graduate students take advantage of funding for on-site research and language training in a variety of locations around the world. Current students are in process of researching dissertation topics on modern Iranian artists, urbanism and architecture under global capitalism, and medieval painting.