Core Faculty Publications

The graduate program in Visual and Cultural Studies (VCS) is an active research community. Below are some of the books published by VCS current and former faculty.

Robert Foster

Uneven Connections: A Partial History of the Mobile Phone in Papua New Guinea

ANU Press, 2024

Jason Middleton

Labors of Fear: The Modern Horror Film Goes to Work

University of Texas Press, 2023

Matthew Omelskey

Fugitive Time: Global Aesthetics and the Black Beyond

Duke University Press, 2023

Joanne Bernardi

Provenance and Early Cinema

Indiana University Press, 2021

Joanne Bernardi

Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema (eds. J. Bernardi and S. Ogawa)

Routledge, 2021

Anna Rosensweig

Subjects of Affection: Rights of Resistance on the Early Modern French Stage

Northwestern UP, 2021

Christopher Heuer

Andrea Büttner: Libri Vargatorum: Der Bettler Orden

Cologne: König, 2020

Christopher Heuer

Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic, the End of the Image

Zone Books/MIT Press, 2019

Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr.

Black Sexual Economies: Race & Sex in a Culture of Capital

University of Illinois Press, 2019

Joel Burges

Out of Sync & Out of Work: History and the Obsolescence of Labor in Contemporary Culture

Rutgers UP, 2018

Robert Foster

The Moral Economy of Mobile Phones: Pacific Islands Perspectives

ANU Press, 2018

Christopher Heuer

Ecologies, Agents, Terrains

Yale UP, 2018

John Michael

Secular Lyric: The Modernization of the Poem in Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson

Fordham University Press, 2018

Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr.

Intercultural Communication in Your Life

Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 2018

Robert Foster

Art, Artifact, Commodity: Perspectives on the P.G.T. Black Collection

Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences, 2017

Joel Burges

Time: A Vocabulary of the Present

NYU Press, 2016

Llerena G. Searle

Landscapes of Accumulation: Real Estate and the Neoliberal Imagination in Contemporary India

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Sharon Willis

The Poitier Effect: Racial Melodrama and Fantasies of Reconciliation

University of Minnestoa Press, 2015

Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr.

Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Jason Middleton

Documentary’s Awkward Turn: Cringe Comedy and Media Spectatorship

Routledge, 2013

Christopher Heuer

Vision and Communism

New York, New Press, 2011

Christopher Heuer

The City Rehearsed: Object, Architecture, and Print in the Worlds of Hans Vredeman de Vries

Routledge, 2009

Robert Foster

Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea

Palgrage-McMillan, 2008

John Michael

Identity and the Failure of America from Thomas Jefferson to the War on Terror

University of Minnestoa Press, 2008

Jason Middleton

Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones

Duke UP, 2007

Robert Foster

Materializing the Nation: Commodities, Consumption, and Media in Papua New Guinea

Indiana UP, 2002

Joanne Bernardi

Writing in Light: The Silent Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film Movement

Wayne State University Press, 2001

John Michael

Anxious Intellects: Academic Professionals, Public Intellectuals, and Enlightenment Values

Duke UP, 2000

Sharon Willis

High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Films

Duke UP, 1997

Robert Foster

Nation Making: Emergent Identities in Postcolonial Melanesia

University of Michigan Press, 1995

Robert Foster

Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia: Mortuary Ritual, Gift Exchange, and Custom in the Tanga Islands

Cambridge UP, 1995

John Michael

Emerson and Skepticism: The Cipher of the World

Johns Hopkins UP, 1988

Sharon Willis

Marguerite Duras: Writing on the Body

University of Illinois Press, 1987