To receive a certificate in Visual Studies, students must take MDA/VIST 501.

Seminar Description:
Over the last two decades, visual studies has gained wide currency as a topic of research and teaching in universities both in the United States and abroad. Scholars from disciplines as diverse as art history, American studies, literature, anthropology, film and media studies, history and gender studies have focused attention on both the cultural specificity of vision and on the ever-widening array of images and objects available for viewing.

This course will provide a critical introduction to the history, methods and central debates within the field. How have scholars and critics taken up – or in some cases dismissed - the study of visual studies and to what ends? What are the limits and possibilities of the interdisciplinary models on offer? We will explore these questions through a sustained engagement with selected texts about images, vision, visuality and visual objects. Students will write a final paper of 20-25 pages in length in which they choose a visual object, experience, institution, or theory about vision and visuality and survey how it has been studied and then re-examine it from the perspective of what they have learned about Visual Studies and interdisciplinarity over the course of the semester.

Fall 2009 Course Description

Fall 2007 Course Description

Fall 2006 Course Syllabus