Art History and Visual Culture Studies
Art History and Visual Culture Studies Department Website »
The discipline of art history and field of visual culture studies move across a spectrum of social and historical contexts and conceptual frameworks. Students taking courses in AHVCS focus on histories of artistic production and material culture. They investigate the lives of images and artifacts, and consider how visual practices have shaped values, experience, identity and action.
Our courses enable students to explore, understand and evaluate topics as diverse as the designing and redesigning of the Late Medieval city, the aesthetic traditions surrounding Japanese tea, imaging racial justice in twentieth-century America, and the role of art in public spaces.
Whitman College offers major and minor study programs in art history and visual culture studies. Both programs present a flexible and rigorous curriculum that incorporates perspectives from across a wide variety of fields, including theatre, philosophy, environmental humanities, classics, Japanese and German Studies. Major and minor students will become familiar with the history and historiography of visual texts, and contemporary interdisciplinary approaches to the study of representation in its multiple forms.
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