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.
Recent Courses Involving Visual Culture
- 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
Graduate Faculty
Blogging, film, cartoons, graphic design
Queer film and aesthetics
Deleuze and the visual arts, film
Avant-Garde Movements, Surrealism and Dada, Film, Pulp Fiction
Feminist visual culture, visual art and performance, film, digital video culture
Modernist manifestoes, modernist aesthetics, modernist visual and performance arts, visual representations of disability
Documentary film, visual literacies, popular imagery, visual representations of race
Post-print manuscript culture, paleography and the art of handwriting, book and manuscript production processes, reader marginalia, manuscript materials: pen, ink, and paper; Manuscript digitalization
Visual Culture
Art in modern literature and poetry, communities of artists and authors, modernist art and design, modern periodicals, the aesthetics of Japanism, queer aesthetics
Comics Studies, medieval manuscripts
Aesthetics and postaesthetics; conceptual and postconceptual art; political histories of art and film; critical visual literacy
