The Philosophy of Visual Studies

The Visual Studies Program was co-created two decades ago by Gary Hatfield, who has become the program’s director and primary advisor.

The program grew out of an interdisciplinary faculty seminar series that started in the mid-1990s, the Power of Sight, says Hatfield, who is a philosophy professor. In 2001, Hatfield teamed with Renata Holod, a history of art professor, to propose a major that studied vision and visual artifacts from different perspectives. The visual studies major was approved by Arts & Sciences in 2002 and first offered in the spring of 2003, and the first student to graduate with the major, Brittany Henshaw, was in 2004.

“We were trying to cut across divisions between humanities and science and fine arts,” says Hatfield. “This is a very personalized major that is highly attractive to certain students. They want to put something together that crosses these boundaries.”