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The Program in Visual and Cultural Studies (VCS) is an interdisciplinary program that was developed as a collaboration across departments. VCS’s core faculty are situated in anthropology, art and art history, Black studies, English, and modern languages and cultures. Our vibrant intellectual community also includes affiliate faculty from these and other departments and programs, including gender, sexuality, and women’s studies, history, and the Eastman School of Music.

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.

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