Visual Studies Graduate Certificate
Course Guide: Fall 2025
Required Courses:
VISS 501: Introduction to Visual Studies: Methods and Debates
Vanessa Schwartz, THH 308, Wednesday 2-4:50pm
Over the last two decades, Visual Studies has gained wide currency as a field 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, psychology, history, and gender studies have focused attention on both the cultural specificity of vision and on the everwidening 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 culture 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 that are rich in methodological orientation and that address such subjects as definitions of the image, the experience of seeing, the science of vision, constructions of visuality, and the experience and creation of visual objects.
This course is one of two required courses as part of the USC’s Visual Studies Graduate Certificate (VSGC).
Pre-approved Seminars:
CSLC 501: Introduction to Comparative Media Studies
Jennifer Wild, THH 207, Monday 2-4:50pm
Ways of thinking about the differences and relations among different cultural media: literature, film, video, manga/comics, new media, and so forth.
CTCS 564: Seminar in Film and Television Genres: Film Genre in the Age of the Global Shuffle
Henry Jenkins, SCA 316, Tuesday 2-5:50pm
Advanced study of a selected genre of film and/or television and its relationship to history, society, and culture, as well as to genre theory.
CTCS 678: Seminar in Film Theory and Medium Specificity: The Politics of Everyday Life
Jennifer Wild, SCA 216, Thursday 2-5:50pm
Explores the way film has been theorized in relationship to traditional media that preceded it and electronic media that followed.
EALC 509: Transnational Korean Cinema
Youngmin Choe, WPH 400, Thursday 2-4:50pm
Korean cinema since the early 20th century, focusing on transnational production, circulation and consumption.
EALC 535: Proseminar in Chinese Visual Culture
Jenny Chio, SOS B51, Wednesday 2-4:50pm
Chinese visual culture through the complex interface of art and thought. Examines architectural layout, pictorial representation, decorative motif as part of cultural production that intertwines with intellectual trends.
ENGL 502: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory
Jonathan Leal, THH 105, Tuesday 5-7:50pm
The assumptions and practices of major post-modern theorists and theoretical schools.
Seminars that may be approved for substitution:
AHIS 503: Categories and Collections
Daniela Bleichmar, THH 308, Tuesday 2:30-5:20pm
How collections are organized by category — e.g., period, culture, materials, or mode of production. Examines collecting protocols, historiography and modes of collecting and viewing associated with that category.
ANTH 575: Seminar in Ethnographic Film
Nancy Lutkehaus, Monday 2-4:50pm
Survey of ethnographic film using both the dimensions of natural history descriptions and process, contrasted with naturalism and structuralism as tools of controlled comparison and analysis.