Visual Studies at USC

Since antiquity, vision has been both celebrated and distrusted as a source of knowledge. Visual signs and systems are at once the oldest and newest means of communication and arguably, the most crucial for 21st-century research and scholarship. Visual studies demands an interdisciplinary approach that addresses diverse media while critically examining the practices of seeing, showing, and knowig, whether in art museums or photo albums, in movie multiplexes or magnetic resonance labs, on desktop computers or in digital image libraries. There are few areas of study that form as much of a crossroads for USC's strategic interests in globalization, communication, and urbanization.

This certificate provides Ph.D. students with the tools and knowledge necessary to think critically about visual objects and experiences and to bring that thinking to bear on their ongoing scholarly work and doctoral research. Students will combine the sustained analysis of specific representations with attention to broader philosophical frameworks and historical conditions.

The Visual Studies Graduate Certificate is designed for students enrolled in a Ph.D. program at USC whose scholarly work includes a significant focus on visual culture. Rather than attending to visual forms (e.g. art, film, photography, advertising, digital media, illustrated books) in isolation from one another, the certificate considers the overlaps between images, texts and material objects was well as the alternative modes of interpretation such overlaps demand.

See the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate Call for Proposals for Team-Taught Graduate Seminars for Spring 2010

See the ad for the 2009-2010 Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Modern or Contemporary Art

See the ad for the 2009-2011 Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Early Modern Visual Studies

See the Spring 2006 article, "Critical Vision," in the College Magazine.