Teaching

Aaron C. Pattee, Ph.D., is an architectural historian and part-time lecturer in the College of Architecture. He teaches history of design and modern architecture, as well as other teaching appointments. He is also a part-time lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at UNL where he teaches courses in archaeology and cultural anthropology.

Research

The main areas of Aaron’s research are medieval and baroque architecture, medieval archaeology, and digital humanities. To that end, he currently co-directs a collaborative investigation of a thirteenth century Franciscan convent in Tuscany, Italy, alongside fellow researchers from UNL, New York University, and Dartmouth College. The project uses state-of-the-art 3D modelling systems—including Structure from Motion (SfM) photogrammetry and terrestrial laser scanning—as well as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) to explore the medieval ruins and discover lost structures. 

He is also a Fellow of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at UNL where he recently received a grant to apply Artificial Intelligence for the exploration of hidden data in a graph database that he developed during his Ph.D. The data consists of thousands of historical individuals, hundreds of proceedings (both economic and political), and hundreds of locations sourced from over 700 medieval charters concerning the territory and castles around Kaiserslautern, Germany, from 1150 to 1300 AD. The project aims to apply hierarchical conglomerative clustering, followed by a recurrent neural network to discover what is happening in gaps within the data.

Interdisciplinary work has played a major role in his scholarship, as he has published alongside more than 20 international researchers from the fields of anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art history, computer linguistics, computer vision, geography, and history.

Service

Besides his teaching appointments and research, Aaron is a member of the UNL Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program Steering Committee and faculty advisor for the RSO The Architects Guild.

Area of Instruction

DSGN 140: History of Design

ARCH 241: Modern Architecture

ANTH 304: Archaeological Collections

UHON 298: How to Build a Cathedral