Penn State faculty in the English Department participate actively in our dual-title PhD program in Visual Studies. Our faculty engages issues of the relationship between texts and images across a wide range of historical and methodological fields. Students in this program also take advantage of course offerings in a range of other departments. For a full list of faculty and course offerings, visit the VSTUD website.
Some Recent Graduate Seminars
Visual Culture Theory and History
Visual Studies in Digitality
Modern Literature and Modern Art
Evolving Forms of Internet Literatures
Mass Culture and Machines
Graduate Faculty
Queer film and aesthetics
Feminist visual culture, visual art and performance, film, digital video culture
Artificial intelligence and software engineering; platform, software, and code studies; history of interface design; visual programming languages and cultures of software development; digital visual poetry and poetics
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
Poetics and politics of film; art in social movements; deciphering practices; postaesthetics; critical visual and digital literacies
Graduate Students
visual studies as an institutional phenomenon, development of visual technology in society, mass-cultural visual forms, the meaning of the aesthetic after visual studies
Visual Culture
