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 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 selected aspects of art from the Renaissance 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.
Supervision is available in the following areas of research:
- contemporary visual culture (particularly in Australia) including: photography, performance art, fashion, advertising, cyberculture, digital media
- history and theory of film and television including: Australian 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 Renaissance and Baroque, especially in Italy; European and American art from the 19th to 21st century; Australian colonial to 21st century, including Aboriginal art; history and theory of photography; applications of colonial/postcolonial, psychoanalytic and queer theory; gallery and museum studies.
