This seminar will survey a variety of theories of vision and visuality in order to forge new analytic tools for the study of visual artifacts and experiences. Because the seminar will examine these issues from the perspectives of both Art History and Film Studies--two disciplines that, despite their shared interests, consist of different methodogical traditions and theoretical trajectories--the optical paradigm of the binocular will serve as the ruling metaphor for the course. The readings have been grouped around the major debates that characterize the emerging discipline of visual studies. Our seminar discussions are intended to address the binocular parallax implicit in such a course--between Art History and Film Studies, between objects and processes, between high art and popular culture, between modernity and post-modernity, between male and female, and so forth--in the hopes of establishing a stereopsis whereby separate fields of study, objects of vision, historical perspectives, gendered positions, and so forth, become deeper, more dimensional, more alive.

This seminar engages recent political and cultural theories of globalization and trans-nationalism to developments in modern and contemporary art and visual culture. Japan and other national communities of art will be examined with the aim of de-centering conventional geographies of modern art. Additional aims of this seminar include ascertaining degrees of globalization in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century networks of art, studying works of art as heuristic devices for understanding phenomena of globalization, and assessing the critique of globalization in contemporary art practice.

From centerfolds to censorship, secret museums to porno-chic, this course explores how sex has been imagined and imaged in the public sphere, and the ways that pornography has inspired both regulatory repression and opened up new ways of thinking about sex. Sex scenes queries what’s at stake in making sex visible and suggests the importance of seeing sex and sexuality everywhere: beyond the bedroom in public life and political debates. Readings will include work by Michel Foucault, Michael Warner, Linda Williams, Laura Kipnis, Richard Meyer, and many others.