Image as History

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

Image as History: Iconography/Photography/Film: This course examines images in three ways: historical, conceptual, and methodological. To begin, we shall read recent historical work that grounds argumentation in a close analysis of images, including religious icons, paintings, prints, photographs, and films, and we shall be especially concerned with examining the role of images over time in relation to state power and in shaping modern understandings of self. In addition, we shall read scholarship written by anthropologists, sociologists, art historians, and media theorists that will help us develop a set of conceptual and methodological tools for analyzing images, carefully considering the status of different types of visual sources for historical research. Although we shall concentrate on 20th-century image-making, there is no geographic or temporal focus to this course.