Stephen Tomlin, Bust of Virginia Woolf, original 1931, bronze copy in Tavistock Square, London
The English Department, a longstanding leader in Anglophone cultural studies, offers a wide range of courses in Visual Studies across every historical field, from medieval to contemporary, and in visual rhetoric, film, and digital studies. For a list of English faculty working in visual culture, visit < http://english.la.psu.edu/faculty-staff/specializations/visual-culture >.
Penn State’s interdisciplinary Visual Studies dual-title Ph.D. program brings together faculty and students from the College of Arts and Architecture, the College of Communications, and the College of the Liberal Arts. Faculty teaching in Visual Studies come from a wide range of departments, including Art History, Comparative Literature, English, French, German, Spanish, and Media Studies.
The program comprises, in addition to elective seminars in those Colleges, two dedicated introductory courses, VSTUD 501 focused on approaches to visual culture in a variety of historical and geographical contexts, VSTUD 502 on issues of digitality in relation to the visual.
Enrollment in this innovative program begins in Fall 2017, and is currently open to students already enrolled, but prior to Ph.D. candidacy, in the Ph.D. programs of the Comparative Literature Department, the English Department, and the Department of Germanic and Slavic languages. For details on admission to the Visual Studies program, those students may contact the Director of Graduate Studies of their home department. Students applying for admission to those graduate programs may make their interest in the Visual Studies degree known and should ensure that their personal statements reflect their interest in visual studies. Details about the program, including the admissions process, are also available in the Graduate Bulletin.
Students in other graduate programs at Penn State are welcome to enroll in graduate seminars that carry credit in Visual Studies.
For questions and further information about Penn State’s dual-title Visual Studies Ph.D. program, please contact Christopher Reed, Liberal Arts Professor of English and Visual Culture.