Graduate

Introduces the visual studies discipline, providing students with an overview of the field's development, its primary texts, and its issues of central concern. Features intensive readings and student-led discussions.

Examines research methods and approaches in a variety of materials, cultures, periods, and subjects that are relevant in the discipline of visual studies. Discussions focus on research and readings by history of art and visual culture faculty who share practices, experiences, and advice.

Students work on grants for educational support, dissertation funding, or both; learn about effective, accessible, and equity-minded TA- and GSI-related pedagogy (including developing course content, logistics, assessment, and grading criteria); and cultivate professional skills in relation to the publication process, CV preparation, and gaining employment in academia and beyond. (Formerly Grant Writing.)

Devoted to grant-writing. Students work on composing and peer-reviewing research proposals, personal statements, bibliographies, CVs, and writing samples. Readings include literature on grant-writing and scholarly writing in the humanities.

Yoruba conceptions of visuality are explored and compared to seeing through Western eyes. Critical reading focuses on Western and Yoruba scholars' work on visualities and complementary theoretical writings on Yoruba aesthetics and philosophy.

Examines theories that attempt to explain iconoclasm, the willful destruction of religious or political objects, by applying the theory (including theories of cultural heritage) to various case studies. The universal aspect of iconoclasm and the differences in understanding and practice are explored.

Examines selected and changing topics in the visual studies of Asia. The specific topic varies with each offering to keep up with recent directions in scholarship.

Indian Buddhist sage-monks (arhats) are portrayed in China in ways that represent a remarkable variety of visual/historical/practice traditions. This seminar examines these depictions and explores the ranges of means and functions attached to this theme.

Begins with an analysis of photography and films capturing the Gandhian and Dalit movement in India. Students then read key Buddhist texts on engaged Buddhism, and look at the rise of engaged Buddhism in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and how it impacted modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia and its diaspora.

Looks at the 18th-century connections of theories of beauty to practices of art-making, the production of knowledge about the natural world, and the construction of race. Students discuss not only the debates of this era but the impacts they have made on the study of visual culture.

Investigates modern monuments (1750 to present) and the creation or maintenance of a nation, especially in terms of war and its immediate aftermath. Destruction or alteration of monuments and production of anti- or counter-monuments are also examined.

Focuses on recent scholarly approaches engaged with the representation of African-American culture and identity, with a specific emphasis in the visualization of blackness. Utilizing a cross-disciplinary approach, students explore the evolving critical discourses concerned with blackness and the human. (Formerly Topics in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture.)

Investigates the complex relationship between photography and history. Considers the evolving perceptions of photography's capacity to capture reality, the discursive means by which photographic truths are produced, and the utility of photographs as primary evidence.

Interdisciplinary approach to the study of democratic political theory of the last two decades and its relation to contemporary art practice with an emphasis on activist art, public art, and theories of speech and performance.

Investigates how discursive systems racialized the sight of various racial and ethnic groups in 19th- and 20th-century U.S. society. Focuses on the construction and maintenance of racial values systems and on the historically specific ways in which an eclectic assortment of visual artifacts have been read by groups over time. Considers the visual and material implications of race-based sight.

Considers how visual culture intersects with environment. Considers how, in the age of neoliberal globalization, documentary and neo-conceptual practices confront the biopolitics of climate change; the financialization and rights of nature; climate refugees; and indigenous ecologies.

Examines and compares radical futurisms-Indigenous, Afro, Chicanx/Latinx, multispecies, Postcapitalist-and situates them in relation to experimental visual cultural, media, and aesthetic practices, asking critical and creative speculative questions about what comes after end-of-world narratives.

Focuses on what is commonly left out of architectural history: the ephemeral, informal, illegal, and uncertain. Topics include: anonymous and collective architecture; temporary interventions; everyday urbanism; and vestigial urban spaces. These topics are understood through theories of space as socially produced (Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, among others), and through cultural movements and manifestoes (Situationist International, Aesthetics of Hunger, etc.)

Departing from an interdisciplinary seminar held at the UC Humanities Research Institute in 1994 entitled "Reinventing Nature," course engages discourses around ecology, technology, environmental politics, and visual representation that emerged in the 1990s through debates about the idea of nature.

Explores how human subjects come to be visually defined and marked by race discourse. Covers diverse theoretical literatures on the topic, primarily in visual studies, but also in cultural studies, post-colonial studies, and psychoanalysis.

An interdisciplinary exploration of the performative dimensions of art, visual culture, and new media. Investigates theories of performance and action across multiple fields and considers their relevance to themes, problems, and contexts of interest to those enrolled.

Through the study of the Byzantine cult of Mary, we examine diverse modalities in the construction and interaction of political, religious, and gender values, and we investigate the interrelated role of images, rituals, and text in human experience, expression, and communication.

Visual literacy is considered as a particular predicament of colonial societies. Students consider the legibility of artifacts in colonial Spanish American contexts given its culturally diverse audiences and examine specific instances of (mis)interpreted images and transcultured representations.

Seminar focusing on the work of contemporary Native American artists. Students explore ecological activism, the relationship of Native artists with the art market and factors that shape artistic production, and what it means to be an Indigenous artist.

Examines collections and exhibitions of colonized people, places, and objects through primary sources, theoretical texts, and analytical case studies (with some emphasis on Oceania). Focuses on visual discourses of race, science, religious conversion, colonial settlement, nation-building, education, and entertainment.

Considers 18th-century to 21st-century colonialisms, especially in Oceania. Concentrates on representations conditioned by particular cross-cultural engagements in colonial peripheries rather than focusing on metropolitan representations. Explores the construction and transgression of rigidly defined colonial identity categories, as expressed in visual/material form. (Formerly offered as Imaging Colonial Peripheries and Borderlands.)

Explores the visual cultures of travel and tourism with some focus on Oceania. Travel and tourism are implicated in the histories of colonialism, ethnography, and globalization, and offer rich sites for critical engagement with theories of transnationalism, imperialism, diaspora, and identity.

Examines selected and changing issues in visual studies. The specific issue varies with each offering to keep pace with recent directions in scholarship.

Directed graduate research and writing coordinated with the teaching of undergraduates. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Directed reading that does not involve a term paper. Students submit petition to course-sponsoring agency. Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

Independent study or research for graduate students. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Independent study or research for graduate students. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Students submit petition to course-sponsoring agency. Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

Students submit petition to course sponsoring agency. Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.

Students submit petition to course sponsoring agency. Enrollment restricted to graduate students.