Richard Wittman specializes in the cultural history of architecture and town planning in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century Europe. Within that framework, themes of interest include: the emergence of modern configurations of space, society, and publicness; 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; religion, religious architecture, and modernity; nationalism and architecture; critiques of the normative historiography concerning architectural modernity and historicism.

Professor Wittman's latest book is being published simultaneously in Italian and English, as Ricostruire la Chiesa. San Paolo fuori le mura nella Roma dell'Ottocento (Viella, 2023) and as Rebuilding St. Paul's Outside the Walls in Rome: Architecture and Catholic Revival in the 19th Century (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Prior to that, he published Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France (Routledge, 2007; French translation 2019). Other major publications include: "Early Modern Church Architecture in Paris," in The Cambridge Guide to the Architecture of Christianity (2023); "A Partly Vacated Historicism: Artifacts, Architecture, and Time in Nineteenth-Century Papal Rome," Grey Room (2021) ; "Churches and States," Places Journal (2019); "The Problem Concerning History," e-flux journal (2017) ; "Space, Networks, and the Saint-Simonians" (Grey Room, 2010) ; "Architecture, Space, and Abstraction in the Eighteenth-Century French Public Sphere," (Representations, 2008) ; and "The Hut and the Altar: Architectural Origins and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France" (Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 2007) .