{"id":198,"date":"2023-02-01T18:54:56","date_gmt":"2023-02-01T18:54:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/vsri\/?page_id=198"},"modified":"2023-02-14T23:36:28","modified_gmt":"2023-02-14T23:36:28","slug":"2016-2017-mellon-sawyer-seminar","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/vsri\/2016-2017-mellon-sawyer-seminar\/","title":{"rendered":"2016-2017 Mellon Sawyer Seminar"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
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VISUALIZING HISTORY: THE PAST IN PICTURES<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Images make history. They document events, preserve memories, allow us to witness at a distance, and move us to act. Images can serve as both records and sources for the writing of history. With funding from the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar program, this seminar investigates the history of \u201cwriting\u201d history in images (what Hayden White termed \u201chistoriophoty\u201d) from the rise of print culture circa 1450 to the global spread of digital media in the present, with an emphasis on the Western tradition and experience, including its imperial contexts. By investigating the many ways in which histories have been told with and in images, we aim to contextualize the current ubiquity of visually mediated evidence, documentation, and narrative.<\/p>\n

In the age of digital media, the power of images to transmit information in the present and craft accounts about the past appears obvious. That power, however, rests on a series of widely held and sometimes contradictory assumptions, among them: that images can be trusted as evidence if their provenance and accuracy are judged adequate; that images have greater emotional impact than words, but are on their own insufficient to write history and thus serve as illustrations to textual narratives; and that images are more universal and more capable of traversing geographic distances and cultural differences than words, except when impeded by unbreachable culturally-specific interpretive walls. The epistemic work of images, their evidentiary status in relation to words and things, and their perceived value as both historical sources and historical accounts have shifted again and again in the period our seminar examines, as have notions of what \u201chistory\u201d itself means.<\/p>\n

This Mellon Sawyer Seminar, hosted by the USC\u00a0Visual Studies Research Institute<\/a>\u00a0and directed by Professors Daniela Bleichmar and Vanessa Schwartz, includes the following programs:<\/p>\n