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Despite its association with distant regions and time periods, Islamic art has a flourishing presence in today’s America, represented by rich museum collections, modern buildings designed in historical styles, and vibrant scholarly networks. This course highlights the special role that Washington, DC, has—as the nation’s capital—taken on within the broader story of Islamic representation in America, a topic we will explore through close firsthand engagement with artworks, buildings, and sites throughout the city. In addition to the world-famous Islamic galleries of the National Museum of Asian Art and the impressive Egyptian-style mosque that Dwight Eisenhower inaugurated in 1957 as the Islamic Center of Washington, we will address lesser-known manifestations of America’s long and politically charged relationship with the Islamic world, including the commemorative stone gifted by the Ottoman sultan Abdülmecid I to the Washington Monument in 1854. The often-overlooked African American connection will feature prominently in the course, with visits to the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Library of Congress, which houses the 1831 Arabic diary of Omar Ibn Said, a scholar from present-day Senegal who spent most of his life as an enslaved man in North Carolina. Throughout the semester, we will remain mindful of the complicated and sometimes difficult nature of American—and, more broadly, Western—interactions with the Islamic world, which have played out against the backdrop of entrenched misconceptions that will be considered in relation to Orientalist paintings at the National Gallery. In responding to these various case studies and perspectives, students will be encouraged to develop and share—in presentations, written assignments, and object-handling sessions—their own ideas about Islamic art and its place in the American capital.