IX. Graduate Programs

Art History and Visual Culture

The MA in Art History and Visual Culture examines the production and consumption of images, objects, and spaces from varied cultures. It challenges prevailing ideas about cognition and perception, and includes the study of the ocular. Because the visual is crucial to our understandings of cultural difference, Art History and Visual Culture Studies is vitally concerned with the manner in which the interdependent elements of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class construct identity. It demands that we think across cultures and national boundaries, and within a global context. Students will learn to discuss and write critically about objects and images in their material, critical, theoretical, and contextual totalities. Students will also explore the concept of identity, the power of visual rhetoric, and the shifting power dynamics inherent in art and its disciplines both in historical and contemporary contexts.