Introduction to Visual Culture

Introduction to Visual Culture is a Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies class taught by Sura Levine and Eva Rueschmann.

Course Description
This course offers a multidisciplinary introduction to the study of visual culture and various critical methods for reading visual representations across media--from fine art, photography and cinema to advertising, illustrations, performance, museum display, exhibition and graphic novels. We will focus on how vision became a privileged sensory experience and cultural expression of meaning making in the modern and postmodern eras. By examining visual arts of the 20th and 21st centuries, students will be introduced to such diverse topics as: spectatorship and subjectivity, the archive as site of cultural and visual memory; self-representation and self-fashioning; the influence of mechanical and digital technologies of reproduction; world views and spatial perception; representations of gender, race and sexuality in visual media; and the politics of museum display.

Learning Goals

 * Expressive
 * Multi-Cultural
 * Project-based
 * Presenting
 * Reading
 * Writing