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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.
Faculty News
Robert Foster named Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow
Robert J. Foster, the Richard L. Turner Professor of Humanities in the Department of Anthropology and the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, has been awarded a Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellowship.
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Feature Story
Defining involution through sculpture
A Rochester graduate student and acclaimed sculptor examines a topic that is increasingly relevant to Chinese society.
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Student Journal
InVisible Culture: A Journal for Visual Culture (IVC) is a student run interdisciplinary journal published online twice a year in an open access format. Through double blind peer reviewed articles, creative works, and reviews of books, films, and exhibitions, our issues explore changing themes in visual culture. Fostering a global and current dialogue across fields, IVC investigates the power and limits of vision.
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Spotlight
Dr. Janet Berlo Retires
For 23 glorious years, Janet Berlo has been at the heart of Visual and Cultural Studies (VCS). She first joined the University of Rochester as the Susan B. Anthony Professor of Gender Studies and Professor of Art History in 1997, having received her PhD from Yale in 1980.
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