Lectures from experts in the field of media culture will be offered this spring by the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester.
"Visual and Cultural Studies Under Construction: Media Culture" will host Patricia R. Zimmerman, professor of cinema and photography in the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College, on Wednesday, March 27. She will discuss "Invisible War: The Befores and Afters of 911, War and Public Media."
On Wednesday, April 24, the series continues with Kari Andén-Papadopoulos, postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, and in the Department of Journalism, Media & Communication at Stockholm University. She will speak on "Global Icons, Parochial Perspectives? Photo Journalism, Visual Culture and the Sept. 11 Attacks." Andén-Papadopoulos works in the area of iconic media imagery, including its relation to the Vietnam War.
The final speaker in the series will be John Tagg, professor and chair of the Department of Art History at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Tagg will speak on Wednesday, May 1, on the topic of "Melancholy Realism," an investigation of melancholia and politics in the photographs of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. Tagg is an authority in the history and theory of photography, modern European and American cultural history, and contemporary critical theory.
All lectures in the works-in-progress series will be held from 12:30 to 2 p.m. in the Management Library Conference Room in Rush Rhees Library on the River Campus. Light refreshments will be served. The programs are free and open to the University community.
The media culture series began Feb. 27 with a lecture on the films of Hungarian director Peter Forgacs by Bill Nichols, professor of art history/visual and cultural studies in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Rochester.
As the first graduate program of its kind in the country, the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies uses an interdisciplinary approach through the humanities, arts, and social sciences to understand visual culture.