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Monash University: University handbooks: Postgraduate handbook: Units indexed by faculty
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Visual culture

Visual culture is a multidisciplinary field which incorporates film, television, visual arts, advertising, the built environment, and new digital and electronic forms of representation. Visual culture is associated with a critical shift in art history/visual arts in the late 1960s and the emergence of new disciplines such as film and television studies within the universities. Visual culture breaks down the historical boundaries between high and popular culture and encourages a broad range of disciplinary approaches, including feminist, Marxist, psychoanalytic, structuralist, poststructuralist, postcolonial and post-humanist analysis. Visual culture also encompasses research in art history, and students may choose to concentrate on aspects of art and architecture from the medieval to the postmodern. Postgraduate programs in visual culture give students the possibility of specialisation in Australian art, film and television studies, galleries, museums and the cultural industry, photography and performance.

Visual culture runs a research laboratory seminar program, in which postgraduate students are expected to participate.

Research strengths and supervision

Supervision is available in the following areas of research strength:

  • Contemporary visual culture (particularly in Australia) including: photography; performance art; fashion; advertising; cyberculture; digital media.
  • History and theory of film and television including: Australian, Indonesian and South East Asian film and television; aspects of European cinema, especially Italian and French; documentary cinema; postmodern and avant-garde film; film theory.
  • Art history and theory including: European medieval, Renaissance and Baroque, especially in Italy; 19th and 20th-century European and American; Australian, colonial to 20th-century; history and theory of photography; applications of colonial/postcolonial, psychoanalytic and queer theory; gallery and museum studies; the art market.
  • Architectural history and theory, especially 19th and 20th-century Australia, America and Europe.

Research degrees

Supervision is available for PhD and research masters candidates. For further information, refer to the entries for these degrees earlier in this section and www.arts.monash.edu.au/visual_culture/pgrad/graduate.html. Visual culture programs are suitable for mid-year commencement.

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