Cluster focus

The Visual Culture Cluster provides a deeper understanding of cultures and their historical development by analyzing visual objects and their influences on society. Faculty and students focus on how the objects and images people see shape their view of the world and change how they experience their lives. The new field is concerned with all aspects of culture that communicate through visual means, virtually everything we see, have seen, or may visualize—paintings, sculptures, mass media, photographs, furniture, utensils, gardens, dance, buildings, artifacts, landscape, toys, maps and more. Faculty study the visual as a reflection of culture and as something that has cultural efficacy in its own right, contributing to the production, reproduction and transformation of culture. Visual studies scholarship looks at the way people use visualizing when understanding the world around them—the practice of “Visual Culture.” As such, the cluster considers not only the visual nature of the piece, but also how it fits within institutional, economic, political, social, ideological and market factors.

Cluster accomplishments

  • Faculty offer 20 undergraduate and graduate Visual Culture courses each semester. Because each cluster faculty member teaches at least one new course each semester, students have many new course choices over the years.
  • Visual culture faculty are developing the curriculum and degree requirements for a visual culture graduate degree program.
  • The cluster offers a monthly Visual Culture Lecture Series with prominent UW-Madison faculty, as well as brings in from three to five national speakers each year to facilitate discussion and open debate to the surrounding community. These workshops, along with faculty colloquia, help keep the cluster and affiliated faculty and students connected and working together.
  • The cluster is developing a proposal to create a Center for Visual Culture to serve as a hub for students and faculty with common interests.
  • A major trans-visual culture conference is scheduled for fall 2006 at UW-Madison for academics and students internationally.

Cluster structure

The Visual Culture Cluster formed a seven-member faculty steering committee, which includes the three faculty hired under the cluster initiates, and holds monthly planning meetings. The cluster links 75 affiliated faculty from 40 different departments in nine schools and colleges whose research or teaching focuses on some aspect of visual culture. This group provides further input and advice for the teaching, research and outreach activities of the cluster, such as the 2006 Trans-Visual Culture conference.

Cluster coordinator, faculty and lead dean

Cluster Coordinator

Cluster Faculty

Lead Dean