Courses for 2012-13

Core Courses:

HAVC 201: Introduction to Visual Studies (Fall)
Introduces the visual studies discipline and the History of Art and Visual Culture Department, providing students with an overview of the field's development, its issues of central concern, and its dominant research methods. Features intensive readings, student-led discussions, and exposure to some of the primary texts instrumental in the development of the field. Required seminar for all first-year visual studies graduate students. K. Beil

HAVC 202: Theories of the Visual (Winter)
Offers detailed theoretical readings to familiarize students with the methodological frameworks and debates that laid the groundwork for the field as well as those that have proven productive for practitioners of visual studies. (Formerly Critical Theory.)  D. Murray

HAVC 203: Theories and Histories of Seeing (Spring)
Each spring quarter this course makes use of a different cultural case study to sensitize students to the historically specific paradigms that have guided human vision (and to illustrate the ways in which particular societies consciously conceptualized vision). The society under consideration will change each year, depending on the research interests of the faculty member teaching the course. Students will take the course twice.

Spring 2013 version of 203: Theories and Histories of Seeing: Visual Cultures of Travel and Tourism in Oceania

This seminar explores the history of the visual cultures of travel and tourism in Oceania (Australia and the Pacific Islands). As key forms of cultural encounter, travel and tourism generate, and have been generated by, a plethora of images and performances that contribute to cultural invention, preservation, and commodification. Travel and tourism are implicated in the histories of colonialism, globalization, and ethnography, and offer rich sites for a critical engagement with theories of transnationalism, imperialism, and identity positioning. Readings provide an introduction to tourism studies, focusing on visual, spatial, performative, and institutional forms of representation, and also examine Oceanic case studies from the nineteenth century to the present. S. Kamehiro

Electives:

HAVC 233: Critical Race Visual Studies (Winter)

Critical Race Visual Studies is a comparative approach to studying the representation of race (plural) in art and visual culture. First, we will consider the advancement of race as an idea as manifest in Western artworks and projects. Whiteness, a construction that has been dependent upon blackness and alterity from its beginnings, is an obvious target. Second, we will consider ethnicity and nationality, e.g., "the Indian," and Orientalism, too. Throughout, we will undertake contextualized examinations of depicted appearances and style as image-making strategy and of power differentials mediated across specific, constructed communities of artists and patrons. J. Francis

HAVC 220 Queer Theory and Visual Culture of Southeast Asia and its Diaspora (Spring)

The introduction of queer theory into Southeast Asia has contributed to a plurality of queer identities that destabilizes local notions of same-sex desire that is based on heteronormative paradigm. This graduate seminar looks at how local notions of desire and “erotics” are defined and made manifest in traditional dance and ritual as well as contemporary art and visual culture of Southeast Asia. Moreover, it examines how the local discourses on queer identity politics engaged with the nation state and the rise of transnational and global queer politics. It will introduce students to a corpus of theoretical writings on gender, sexuality and queer theories in Southeast Asia and its diaspora. B. Ly

Additional Electives (see Catalog)

• HAVC 212, Yoruba Visualities and Aesthetics, E. Cameron
• HAVC 213, Theories and Visual Cultures of Iconoclasm, E. Cameron
• HAVC 222, The Image of Arhat in China, R. Birnbaum
• HAVC 224, Engaged Buddhism and Visual Culture, B. Ly
• HAVC 232, The Monument Since 1750 in Relation to Nationhood and the Experience of War, D. Hunter
• HAVC 240, Seeing Race, M. Berger
• HAVC 245, Race and Representation, J. Gonzalez
• HAVC 250, The Cult of Mary in Byzantium, M. Evangelatou
• HAVC 260, Visual Literacy in Spanish American, 1500-1800, C. Dean
• HAVC 270, Colonial Cultures of Collecting and Display, S. Kamehiro

Independent Study

• Teaching-Related Independent Study

The electives listed here constitute just a sampling of the courses open to Visual Studies graduate students. Prospective students are encouraged to consult the graduate course offerings of the departments and programs of Anthropology, Digital Arts and New Media, Film and Digital Media, History, History of Consciousness and Philosophy, whose seminars are also open to our students.