ARTH 6810 - Visual Studies: Critical Approaches to Art and Visual Culture

Visual Studies is an interdisciplinary seminar in visual culture open to graduate students across the university that will introduce and explore some of the diverse scholarly approaches to the production, use, interpretation and experience of images and visual representations. Through key theoretical texts and a series of historical and contemporary case studies, the course will address a broad range of visual representations including different media and genre of the fine arts, performance, advertising and design, film, television, video and digital media. From this diverse material of visual culture, we will ask a series of interrelated questions. What is visual culture? What are the politics and poetics of vision and visuality. What is the relationship of our daily experience of visuality to the academic study of images? How does the materiality of specific visual practices effect representation and visual experience? How do different media and technologies of representation effect discourses on race, class, gender, the body, art and culture?