Richard Wittman specializes in the cultural history of architecture and town planning in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century Europe. His primary interest lies in the emergence of modern configurations of space, society, and publicness, which he approaches through the history of architectural theory, criticism, and public discourse; the emergence of the modern public; and the evolution of architectural patronage in changing political contexts.

Professor Wittman's first book was Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France (Routledge, 2007). Other recent publications include: "Architecture, Space, and Abstraction in the Eighteenth-Century French Public Sphere," (Representations, 2008), "The Hut and the Altar: Architectural Origins and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France" (Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 2007), and "Space, Networks, and the Saint-Simonians" (Grey Room, 2010). He also wrote the entry on Early Modern Paris in the forthcoming Cambridge World History of Religious Architecture, and a survey of recent scholarship on "Print Culture and French Architecture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries" in the June 2015 edition of Perspective, the online journal of the INHA in Paris. Professor Wittman is currently completing a cultural history of the century-long reconstruction of the Early Christian basilica of San Paolo fuori le mura in Rome (1825-1933).