Schedule

Part I: Definitions and Approaches

Week One (08/26): Visual History Then: An Emerging Field

  • Svetlana Alpers, “Is Art History?,” Daedalus 106:3 (Summer, 1977): 1–13
  • Carlo Ginzburg, James D. Herbert, W.J.T. Mitchell, Thomas F. Reese, Ellen Handler Spitz, “Inter/Disciplinarity,” Art Bulletin 77:4 (December 1995): 534–52
  • “The Visual Culture Questionnaire,” October 77 (Summer 1996): 25–70
  • W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (The University of Chicago Press, 1994), Introduction and ch. 1, “The Pictorial Turn,” 1–34
  • Before class, post an image on the response page for this week and explain (in writing) “why the image” and “why visual studies” for you, considering these questions in relation to the week’s readings.

Special Event: Friday, August 28th, DML 240, 2–4pm
VSGC Welcome Back – lunch, lecture, and reception
Kerry Brougher, Director, Academy Museum of Motion Pictures: “The Glass Screen: Looking into the Dream Factory”

Week Two: (09/2): Visual History Now(ish)
Discussion leaders: Fox & Robert

  • W.J.T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture,” Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 1, no. 2 (2002): 165–81
  • Horst Bredekamp, “A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft,” Critical Inquiry 29 (Spring 2003): 418–28
  • John Michael Krois, “What Are Images and What Are They For?,” online at http://www.kunst-als-wissenschaft.de/multimedia/KroisEn.pdf
  • Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski, eds., The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader (Routledge, 2004): Schwartz and Przybliski, “Visual Culture’s New History: Twenty-First Century Interdisciplinarity and Its Nineteenth-Century Objects,” 3–14 and Cohen and Higonnet, “Complex Culture,” 15–26
  • For class discussion: come prepared to talk for five minutes about a book that has been important to your thinking about images and the study of visual culture. Bring the book if possible.

Special Event: Wednesday, September 2nd, 12.30pm
VSGC graduate student lunch, for all present, past, and future students in the program

Part II: Visual Practices in Context

Week Three (09/09): Picturing News
Guest: David Shneer
NOTE SPECIAL MEETING TIME: 1.30­–3.30pm
Discussion leaders: Chad & Jess

  • David Shneer, “Grief: The History of the World’s First Holocaust Liberation Photograph and the Man Who Made It,” unpublished manuscript
  • Vanessa Schwartz and Jason Hill (eds.), Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News (Bloomsbury, 2015), 1–102 and 176–211

Optional Reading

Special Event: Wednesday, September 09, 3.30–5pm, Hebrew Union College (Hoover Ave. bet. 30th and 32nd St), Room 101
David Shneer, Louis Singer Chair in Jewish History, Professor of History and Religious Studies, University of Colorado, Boulder
“Grief: The History of the World’s First Holocaust Liberation Photograph”

Week Four (09/14): Seeing
*** This meeting is rescheduled to Monday 09/14, 3–5pm, room MRF 206
Discussion leaders: Ashley & Peter

  • John Berger, Ways of Seeing [1973]
  • Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 11, no. 2 (August 2012), “Ways of Seeing Fortieth Anniversary Issue,” available online through USC
  • Watch at least one episode of “Ways of Seeing” (1972), the 4-episode BBC TV program; watch all four if you can.

Week Five (09/23): Period Eyes
Discussion leaders: Emily & Dina

  • Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy. A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), ch. 2, “The Period Eye,” 29–108
  • Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (Yale University Press, 1985), 1–104
  • Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought , (University of California Press, 1993), 1–147

Week 6 (09/30): Early Modern Eyes and Print Culture
Guest: Bill Sherman
Discussion leaders: Melissa & Grant

  • Bill Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), ch. 2, “Toward a History of the Manicule,” 25–52
  • Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art [1992] (University of Chicago Press, 2004), ch. 1, “Making Margins, and ch. 6, “The End of the Edge,”
  • Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye (Oxford University Press, 2007), introduction and ch. 1, “Species: Vision and Values,” 1–8 and 9–38
    (Book available online: http://site.ebrary.com/lib/uscisd/detail.action?docID=10271368)
  • W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (The University of Chicago Press, 1994), ch. 3, “Beyond Comparison: Picture, Text, and Method,” 83–108

Special Event: SOS 250, 12.30pm
Bill Sherman, Director of Research, Victoria and Albert Museum
“Decoding the Renaissance: 500 Years of Codes and Ciphers”

Week 7 (10/07): New Media, Past and Present
Guest: Whitney Davis
Discussion leaders: Anirban & Avigail

  • Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton University Press, 2011), ch. 1, “Vision Has an Art History,” 3–10 and ch. 2, “Vision and the Successions to Visual Culture,” 11–43
  • Whitney Davis, from unpublished manuscript, Visuality and Virtuality: Images and Pictures from Ancient Egypt to New Media, skim introduction and chapter 1, read carefully chapter 2
  • David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (Phaidon, 2003), ch. 1.8, “Facture,” 74–76 and 1.14, “Notionality,” 107–113

Special Event: SOS 250, 12.30–2pm
Whitney Davis, George C. and Helen N. Pardee Professor of History & Theory of Ancient & Modern Art, UC Berkeley
“A Thin Red Line: The ‘Presence’ of Prehistoric Pictoriality”

Part III: Visual Technologies, Epistemologies, and Values

Week 8 (10/14): Media Revolutions: Print
Guest: Susan Dackerman
Discussion leaders: Natalia & Emma

  • William Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication (Harvard University Press, 1953; MIT Press, 1969), chapter 1–3 and 8, pages 1–70 and 158–180 (optional: skim remaining chapters)
    The first edition is available online here. It can be downloaded as a PDF (available on our shared drive).
  • Susan Dackerman (ed.), Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Harvard Art Museums, 2011): read introduction and look through catalog entries, examine carefully at least one print and accompanying text in each section (PDF of entire book available on shared drive)
  • Sachiko Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (University of Chicago Press, 2012), introduction and part II, pages 1–25 and 99–161
    (Available online through USC. Log onto system using shibboleth, click here and then click on “book.”)

Special Event: SOS 250, 12.30–2pm
Susan Dackerman, Consultative Curator at the Harvard Art Museums and GRI Scholar
“Dürer’s Prints and the Mobility of Knowledge”

Week 9 (10/21): Seeing and Knowing
*** For this meeting, please circulate through the response page a short description of your ideas for your final project, which we will discuss in class.
Discussion leaders: Avigail & Randall

  • Anke te Heesen, The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia (University of Chicago Press, 2002)
  • Optional: Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations 40, Special Issue: Seeing Science (Autumn, 1992),
    81–128

Further reading:

  • Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Zone Books, 2007)
  • Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck (eds.), Histories of Scientific Observation (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Week 10 (10/28): Media Revolution: Video and Social Knowledge
Guest: Peter Collopy
Discussion leaders: Jessica & Dina

  • Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man  [1964] (MIT Press, 1994), introduction and chapters 1–3, “The Medium Is the Message,” “Media Hot and Cold,” and “Reversal of the Overheated Medium,” 3–40
  • David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (MIT Press, 1990), preface and chapters 2–3 (“The Great White Way” and “Crosstown Transfer”), pages ix-xi and 29-137
    The book is available online through USC. Click here.
  • Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century [1977] (University of California Press, 1986), chapters 2–4 and intervening excursus, 16–69

Special Event: SOS 250, 12.30–2pm
Peter Collopy, USC Digital Humanities Post-Doctoral Fellow
“The Revolution Will Be Videotaped: Making a Technology of Consciousness in the Long 1960s”

Week 11 (11/04): Visual Values: Reproduction and the Market
Discussion leaders: Grant & Melissa

  • Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (Shocken Books, 1969), 217–51
  • Winnie Wong, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (University of Chicago Press, 2014)

Optional

  • David Joselit, After Art (Princeton University Press, 2013)

Week 12 (11/11): Visual Values: Mobility and Materiality
Discussion leaders: Chad & Robert

  • Daniela Bleichmar and Meredith Martin (eds.), Art History 38.4 (Fall 2015), special issue: Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World

Week 13 (11/18): Visual Values: Cultural Encounters
Guest: Cécile Fromont
Discussion leaders: Emily & Emma

  • Cécile Fromont, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), introduction, ch. 1, and ch. 3
  • Alessandra Russo, The Untranslatable Image: A Mestizo History of the Arts in New Spain, 1500–1600 (University of Texas Press, 2014), introduction, ch. 1–3, conclusion

Special Event: SOS 250, 12.30–2pm
Cécile Fromont, Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Chicago
“Envisioning Cross-Cultural Knowledge: Capuchin Images of Early Modern Kongo and Angola”

Week 14: Thanksgiving

Final presentations: Tuesday 12/08, SOS 250, 2–5pm
Final paper due Friday 12/11 electronically (Google Drive)