Visual and Material Cultures

Just as scholars have come to understand the ways that historical experience is constituted by language and the ways people talk, historical experience is also constituted by the visual environment in which people worked, walked, learned, created, played and fought. Historians of material and visual culture examine the ways people in the past experienced their worlds visually, the artifacts they produced to construct visual and material traces of their experiences, the networks of exchange and power within which producers and consumers of the visual operated, as well as the shifting, often contradictory meanings attributed to vision itself.

We study (and are open to studying) all visual and material artifacts, including (but not limited to): architecture, advertising, books and manuscripts, cartoons, cinema, design, fashion, furniture, iconography, maps, the natural and built landscape/cityscape, painting, photography, performance and performing arts, posters, public behaviors, ritual objects and regalia, and textiles.

Visual and Material Cultures faculty list