Areas of Specialization
Visual Culture
Faculty at Penn State participate actively in the burgeoning field of Visual Culture. Our faculty engage issues of the relationship between texts and images in every historical field, from the medieval to the contemporary. The detailed list of areas of faculty specialization below demonstrates the richness of the department’s resources in historical fields, as well as our interest in graphic novels, digital media, film, and other popular media.
Christopher Reed specializes in modern English visual culture, and has published widely on issues concerning the art, design, and aesthetic theory associated with the Bloomsbury group. Our faculty’s interest in modernist Visual Culture is also reflected in the new Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, co-founded by MarkS. Morrisson, as well as the Refiguring Modernism: Arts, Literatures, Sciences book series published by Penn State University Press, for which Morrisson and Janet Lyon serve as editors.
Recent events organized in the department have included lectures by the graphic novelists Gene Luen Yang, author of American Born Chinese, and Jessica Abel, author of La Perdida.
Additionally, our faculty are involved in organizing exhibitions both on and off campus. 
Garrett Sullivan co-curated the exhibitions “To Sleep, Perchance to Dream” and “History in the Making: How Early Modern Britain Imagined its Past” at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Christopher Reed co-organized the exhibition “A Room of their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections,” which is traveling to six academic gallery venues between 2008 and 2010, and assisted with the exhibition “Beyond Bloomsbury: Designs of the Omega Workshops” at the Courtauld Insititute Gallery in London during the summer of 2009. On campus, faculty in English work with the Palmer Museum of Art, the Institute of Arts and Humanities, and Special Collections to stage exhibitions.
Edmund C. Tarbell, Girl Reading, 1909. Oil on canvas.
Palmer
Museum
of Art,
Pennsylvania State University,
gift of The Frank Family
Course Offerings in Specialization
A few of our recent offerings for specialized seminars involving visual culture have included:
- Authors and Artists
- The Bloomsbury Group
- Foundations of Science Studies
- Introduction to Visual Culture
- Graphic Fiction
- Graphic Fiction, Illness, and Disability
- Life in Pictures: the Graphic Novel
- Literature, Medicine, and Culture
- Literatures and Cultures of HIV/AIDS
- Media Theory and Literature
- Milton; Literature and the English Revolution
- Victorian Poetry in Sight and Sound
- Virginia Woolf
Faculty and Areas of Specialization (by historical period, listed chronologically)
Scott Smith
Medieval manuscript culture, manuscript layout
Marcy North
Post-print manuscript culture, paleography and the art of handwriting, book and manuscript production processes, reader marginalia, manuscript materials: pen, ink, and paper
Laura Knoppers
Portraiture, engraving, book illustration, satiric prints, popular imagery
Clem Hawes
William Hogarth, James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, "Cul de Sac," illustrations of Gulliver's Travels.
Emily Harrington
Ekphrasis, history of the book
Mark Morrisson
Modern periodicals, avant-garde art, visual culture of science, visual culture of Theosophy
Jonathan Eburne
Avant-Garde Movements, Surrealism and Dada
Janet Lyon
Modernist manifestoes, modernist aesthetics, visual representations of disability
Christopher Reed
Art in modern literature and poetry, communities of artists and authors, modernist art and design, modern periodicals, the aesthetics of Japanism, queer aesthetics
Linda Selzer
Political cartoons and artists’ representations of race
Faculty and Areas of Specialization in Digital Media, Film, other Popular Visual Media, Theories of Visual Culture
Michael Bérubé
Blogging, film, cartoons, graphic design
Christopher Castiglia
Queer film and aesthetics
Claire Colebrook,
Deleuze and the visual arts, film
Jonathan Eburne
Film, pulp fiction
Clem Hawes,
Contemporary cartoons
Brian Lennon
New media, visual poetry, net art, Web art
Janet Lyon
Visual representations of disability
Shirley Moody
Documentary film, visual literacies, popular imagery, visual representations of race
Jeffrey T. Nealon
Film, contemporary visual culture, visual culture theory
Marcy North
Manuscript digitalization
Benjamin Schreier
Film
Sanford Schwartz
Film
Stuart Selber
New media design, human-computer interaction design, design of technical documents
Scott Smith
Comics, graphic novels
Susan Squier
Medical imaging, scientific illustration and digital visualization technologies, agricultural breed illustration, fashion photography, feminist visual culture, graphic novels, cartoons, visual representations of disability
Elmer Boyd Smith,Chicken World, 1910.
