As an undergraduate, Trachtenberg studied English literature at Yale with Harold Bloom. At the Institute of Fine Arts, he turned to premodern architecture under Wolfgang Lotz, Richard Pommer, and especially Richard Krautheimer, who supervised his monograph on the Florentine Campanile (Hitchcock Prize, SAH, 1974).  After a return to modernity with his Statue of Liberty (1976) and a decade producing a survey of architectural history (Architecture, 1986, 2002), Trachtenberg again focused on premodern Italy, resulting in a radically revisionist study of trecento urbanism, Dominion of the Eye (1997, Hitchcock Prize, SAH, and Morey Prize, CAA, 1999).  Issues raised by structures with long building histories and multiple architects led him to formulate the ideas resulting in Building-in-Time from Giotto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion (2010, George Sarton Prize in History of Science, Ghent University). Recently he was awarded the Agnes Mongan Prize by Harvard for his cumulative work on Renaissance art.  He is currently completing a book for the Yale University Press on Brunelleschi and the Pazzi Chapel.