History of Visual Culture LIBS 7026

Students will consider influential theoretical perspectives on visual culture and will themselves connect ideas and objects from the past or distant societies to those in the present. Students will evaluate how features of artworks and objects inform important social, ethical, environmental, economic, religious, and philosophical themes, and are informed by them. Themes to be explored may include: the rise of the individual in society, including issues of gender and class; the status of nature and the cosmos in a human-made environment; tensions between the secular and the sacred, reason and passion; teleological and cyclical theories of time; influence of technology and science on aesthetics and the built environment; conflicting schemes of justice and political organization. Visual culture in the ancient and medieval periods, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Modernist and post-Modernist periods may be considered.