Graduate Program

The Program in Visual and Cultural Studies (VCS) was established in 1988 and gained New York State approval in 1991. The Program was developed, however, as a collaboration across departments and disciplines, primarily art and art history and modern languages and cultures, with their shared interests in film, art, and visual studies, and with the participation of faculty from anthropology, English, history, studio arts, and the Eastman School of Music. These objects include, but are not limited to: painting and sculpture, film, photography, television, new media; they also have included the segregated and affective spaces of American zoos; the liminal and “misused” spaces of Istanbul; artifacts of Korean national memory including its national archives; and the interaction between American media and public health information.

The focus of the Program is on the critical and social-historical analysis of visual objects. Through interdisciplinary coursework and individual research, students develop critical skills to equip them to engage in the analysis of visual images, ranging from more traditional art historical approaches (including formalist and social-art historical approaches) to those developed by literary and film studies (semiotics, psychoanalytic criticism, narratology), and other historical approaches (including those using digital tools and ethnographic methods), which can produce wider perspectives in the study of visual culture. Central to this work are feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories, alongside the interdisciplinary study of race.