Visual Culture

Field Description

The ISF Research Field on Visual Culture incorporates the breadth, depth and complexity of visuality in shaping aesthetics and culture, and also society and politics, in history and today. It presents a broad array of visual objects (from painting to cinema, but also the built environment) encompassing the field of art history and the humanities, and extending to disciplines throughout the social sciences, from geography to anthropology. By “visual culture”, we study at once the visual display of information in all disciplines and especially visual modes of constituting regimes and orders–inquiries that include the cognitive sciences and psychology. Visual materials produce and represent social change and historical evidence, are mobilized as legal and scientific proof, used to build and forge identities, and change modes of perception generally. These are the kinds of interdisciplinary domains for the study of visual culture.

Recent ISF Senior Theses

Comparing Love: How Romantic Relationships are Portrayed in Hollywood and Bollywood Movies, 1999-2009
Comparing Holocaust and Memorial Sites in Germany, South Africa, Chile and the US
Street Art in Tahrir Square
Westernizing China Through Images: How the West Influences Chinese Culture Despite Government Controls
The Contemporary Spanish Art Film and its Effects on Mexican Cinema
In the Eye of the Beholder: The French Art Museum and its Publics
Image and Projected Space of Mind: The Role of Image in the Creation of Meaning
Shaping Young Women: The Connection Between Photography in Advertising and Rates of Bulimia
Politicization of Aesthetics and the Fetish of the Visual: The Veiled Muslim Woman as Sociopolitical Critique in Street Art
Bin ich ein Berliner? Identity Construction Through the Use of Public Art and Space in Post-Reunification Berlin
The Public Aesthetics of Social Change
Appropriating Culture After War: The Street Art Movement in the Post-World War II United States
Changing Society Through the Fake: How the Young Use their Imagination for Social Change

Relevant UC Berkeley Courses

Practice of Art 119: Global Perspectives in Contemporary Art
Rhetoric 114: Rhetoric of New Media–Visual Rhetoric
Media Studies 101: Visual Communications
Media Studies 170: Cultural History of Advertising
Visual Studies 185X: Special Topics: Word and Image
History of Art 180C: Nineteenth-Century Europe: The Invention of Avant-Gardes
English 173: Language and Literature of Films
Anthropology 152: Art and culture
Rhetoric 133T: Theories of Film
French 175A: Literature and Visual Arts
Anthropology 138A: History and Theory of Ethnographic Film
Sociology 160: Sociology of Culture

Bibliographical Resources

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Gruzinski, Serge. 2001. Images at War: Mexico From Columbus to Blade Runner. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Heywood, Ian and Barry Sandywell, eds. 1999. Interpreting Visual Culture: Explorations in the Hermeneutics of Vision. London and New York: Routledge.

Hilmes, Michele, ed. 2007. NBC: America’s Network. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Hite, Katherine. 2013. Politics and the Art of Commemoration: Memorials to Struggle in Latin America and Spain. New York: Routledge.

Horowitz, Noah. 2014. Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Jain, Kajri. 2007. Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books.

Jenks, Chris, ed. 1995. Visual Culture. London and New York: Routledge.

Johnson, Galen A., ed. 1993. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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Kleege, Georgina. 2005. “Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account.” Journal of Visual Culture 4(2):179–90.

Lacan, Jacques. 1998. “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a.” Pp. 67–122 in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Lacan, Jacques. 2007. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I.” Pp. 75–81 in Ecrits. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Lamarche, Pierre. 2001. “Tradition, Crisis, and the Work of Art in Benjamin and Heidegger:” Philosophy Today 45(9999):37–45.

Larson, Stephanie Greco. 2005. Media & Minorities: The Politics of Race in News and Entertainment. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Latour, Bruno. 1990. “Visualization and Cognition: Drawing Things Together.” Pp. 19–68 in Representation in Scientific Activity, edited by Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lavin, Maud. 2002. Clean New World: Culture, Politics, and Graphic Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lemish, Dafna. 2006. Children and Television: A Global Perspective. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Levin, Thomas Y., Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel, eds. 2002. CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lewis, Lisa. 1991. Gender Politics And MTV: Voicing the Difference. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Manghani, Sunil. 2008. Image Critique and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Manovich, Lev. 2002. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Masheck, Joseph. 1993. Building-Art: Modern Architecture under Cultural Construction. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

Massood, Paula, ed. 2008. The Spike Lee Reader. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Mayer, Vicki. 2003. Producing Dreams, Consuming Youth: Mexican Americans and Mass Media. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

McCarthy, Anna. 2010. The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America. New York: The New Press.

McLuhan, Marshall. 2008. The Mechanical Bride. Reprint edition. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press.

McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. 2001. The Medium Is the Massage. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press.

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Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 1999. Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews. London and New York: Routledge.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2004. Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture. London: Routledge.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2011. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ed. 2012. The Visual Culture Reader. London and New York: Routledge.

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Mitchell, W. J. T. 1995. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Mitchell, W. J. T. 2002. “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture.” Journal of Visual Culture 1(2):165–81.

Mitchell, W. J. T. 2006. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Mosco, Vincent. 2009. The Political Economy of Communication. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications.

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Nakamura, Lisa. 2007. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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Rancière, Jacques. 2011. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso.

Rancière, Jacques. 2013. The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

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Campus Resources