About Visual Culture

The Visual Culture Cluster is composed of academics, curators, practitioners, museum educators, and consultants with research expertise across a range of historical, theoretical, and practice-led forms of inquiry. In the last few years staff have published in Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Curator: The Museum Journal, Literature, History of Photography, and Visual Culture Studies; have been invited to give plenary addresses and lectures internationally in universities including Barcelona, Bergen, Madrid, Oslo and Zurich in Europe; and Brown, Johns Hopkins, MIT and the Smithsonian in the USA; and exhibited and curated in cultural institutions in cities such as Toronto, Shanghai, Beijing, and Canberra.

Degree programmes

The cluster is home to the Cultural and Literary Studies Suite, a group of four MAs commitment to investigating modern and contemporary culture from aesthetic, critical, literary, and experiential perspectives: the Art and Visual Culture MA; the Cultural and Critical Studies MA; the English Literature: Modern and Contemporary Fictions MA; and the Museum, Galleries and Contemporary Culture MA. This is an intellectually-rigorous and multi-disciplinary environment designed to facilitate the sprouting of interdisciplinary thinking. 

As an international research environment with MA and PhD students from Britain, the USA, continental Europe, Africa, South America and South East Asia, the Visual Culture Cluster offers a fruitful context to conduct research in areas such as the visual and material culture of the city; modernism in art and architecture; popular and avant-garde cultures; women's experimental photography and film; social and cultural history of photography; fin de siècle visual culture; new media and digital arts; film studies, with a particular focus on Spain and Latin America; migration, identity and gender as represented in cultural practices; politics of aesthetics and aesthetic theory; and critical theories of modern and contemporary culture.

People

Colleagues in this research area across the University include: