Curriculum

Graduate students intending to concentrate in visual studies must be admitted to a Masters or Ph.D. program at USC. While fulfilling all the requirements for their departmental graduate degree, they may also earn a certificate of competency in visual studies. To receive the certificate, students must take VISS 501 (“Introduction to Visual Studies: Methods and Debates”), a team-taught VISS 599 course, and two other graduate seminars from an approved list of relevant courses, 500 and above, for a total of at least 16 units. Directed research may not be taken toward the award of the certificate.

In addition to the completion of these course requirements, students must focus on visual studies as part of their doctoral dissertation. Alternatively, they may take an oral examination based on three research papers they have written within the context of their visual studies coursework. The oral exam will be administered by faculty members affiliated with the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate. Faculty will be responsible for judging the adequacy of the visual studies component in the student’s dissertation or oral examination.

Over the last two decades, visual studies has gained wide currency as a topic of research and teaching in universities both in the United States and abroad. Scholars from disciplines as diverse as art history, American studies, literature, anthropology, film and media studies, history and gender studies have focused attention on both the cultural specificity of vision and on the ever-widening array of images and objects available for viewing.

This course will provide a critical introduction to the history, methods and central debates within the field. How have scholars and critics taken up – or in some cases dismissed – the study of visual studies and to what ends? What are the limits and possibilities of the interdisciplinary models on offer? We will explore these questions through a sustained engagement with selected texts about images, vision, visuality and visual objects. Students will write a final paper of 20-25 pages in length in which they choose a visual object, experience, institution, or theory about vision and visuality and survey how it has been studied and then re-examine it from the perspective of what they have learned about Visual Studies and interdisciplinarity over the course of the semester.

Taught or team-taught by VSRI affiliated faculty, this is a special topics course in visual studies.

AHIS 501 Problems in the History and Theory of Collecting and Display
AHIS 505 Seminar in Feminist Theory and Visual Culture
AHIS 515 Seminar in Contemporary Art
AHIS 520 Seminar in Modern Art
AHIS 529 Art, Science and Technology
AMST 519 Indigenous, Decolonial and Transhemispheric American Studies
ANTH 502 Contemporary Theory in Anthropology
ANTH 576L Anthropological Media Seminar
ANTH 577L Advanced Anthropological Media Seminar
ANTH 602 The Anthropology of Popular Culture
COMM 516 Feminist Theory and Communication
COMM 544 The Arts and New Media
COMM 584 Seminar: Interpreting Popular Culture
COMM 654 Art, Artists and Society
CSLC 501 Introduction to Comparative Media Studies
CSLC 640 Seminar in Film and Visual Studies
CTCS 511 Seminar: Non-Fiction Film/Video
CTCS 517 Introductory Concepts in Cultural Studies
CTCS 518 Seminar: Avant-Garde Film/Video
CTCS 564 Seminar in Film and Television Genres
CTCS 567 Seminar in Film/Television and a Related Art
CTCS 677 Cultural Theory
CTCS 678 Seminar in Film Theory and Medium Specificity
CTCS 688 Moving Image Histories: Methods and Approaches
EALC 509 Transnational Korean Cinema
EALC 510 Contemporary Japanese Cinema
EALC 512 Japanese Literature and Film
EALC 535 Proseminar in Chinese Visual Culture
ENGL 502 Contemporary Literature and Cultural Theory
ENGL 592 Contemporary British and American Literatures and Cultures
ENGL 620 Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies
FA 551 Fine Art and Interdisciplinary Studies
GERM 581 Weimar Culture
HIST 520 Modernity and its Visual Cultures
HIST 620 Research Seminar on Modern Visual Culture
IML 501L Seminar in Contemporary Digital Media
PAS 575 Practice of Public Art
PAS 585 Public Space, the Public Realm and Public Art
SLL 665 Seminar in Russian Culture and the Arts
THTR 525 Seminar in Contemporary Theatre
THTR 535 Seminar in Aesthetics of the Theatre