Core Courses

• HAVC 201: Introduction to Visual Studies: serves as an introduction to the discipline and the department, providing students with a preview of the field’s development, its issues of central concern and an introduction to its dominant research methods.
• HAVC 202: Critical Theory: provides exposure to methodological frameworks and debates that laid the groundwork for the field as well as those that have proven productive for practitioners of visual studies.
• HAVC 203: Theories and Histories of Seeing: Each winter quarter the 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.

Elective Courses (in process)

• Alternative Architecture
• At the Crossroads of Gender, Politics and Religion: The Cult of Mary in Byzantium
• Colonial Cultures of Collecting and Display
• The Conjunction of Death and Patriotism in Western Art and Culture
• Cross-Cultural Visualities & Aesthetics
• Embodiment: Visuality, Performance, Affect
• Images of Arhats in India and China
• Race and Representation
• Seeing Race
• Visual Literacy in Spanish America, 1500-1800
• Visual Culture of War, Capital, and Trauma
• 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.