Courses for Spring 2025 | Visual Studies

	Title	Instructor	Time	Description	Cross Listings	Fulfills	Syllabus URL
VLST 1010-401	Eye, Mind, and Image	Hammam Aldouri Ian F Verstegen	TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM	Visual Studies 101 provides an introduction to the collaboration of eye, mind, and image that produces our experience of a visual world. How and what do we see? How do we perceive color, space, and motion? What is an image? Does seeing vary across cultures and time? What can art tell us about vision? Is there a 21st-century form of seeing? This course combines different approaches to the study of vision, drawing from psychology, cognitive science, philosophy, history of art, and fine art. Professors representing two or three disciplines present lectures that demonstrate the methods of their disciplines and draw connections across fields. This course combines different approaches to the study of vision, drawing from psychology, cognitive science, philosophy, history of art, and fine art. Professors representing two or three disciplines present lectures that demonstrate the methods of their disciplines and draw connections across fields.	ARTH1500401	Nat Sci & Math Sector (new curriculum only)
VLST 1030-301	3 Dimensions: Time and Space		MW 1:45 PM-4:44 PM	Through studio projects, readings and class discussion, this class will begin to address, both conceptually and physically, basic 3D structures and translations between 3D and 2D, as well as materiality, experiential phenomena, light and time-based processes. The interconnection between mediums in our cultural climate employs a wide range of tools, processes, and ideas. It is imperative that visual studies students recognize and think through these connections. The work produced and ideas confronted in this class will facilitate discussions and constructive criticism on the fundamentalsof space and time via the experiential, conceptual, and the formal as essential elements of meaning. The interconnection between mediums in our cultural climate employs a wide range of tools, processes, and ideas. It is imperative that visual studies students recognize and think through theses connections. The work produced and ideas confronted in this class will facilitate discussions and constructive critism on the fundamentals of space and time via the experiential, conceptual, and the formal as essential elements of meaning.
VLST 1060-301	Virtual Reality Storytelling	Gregory M. Vershbow	T 1:45 PM-4:44 PM	What does it mean to compose for an open world, in 3 dimensions, where the audience can move with 6 degrees of freedom? How does embodiment in a 360 degree space change the experience of the audience? What control does the director maintain when the user chooses their own immersive adventure? In this course, we will explore the past, present, and future of immersive narrative through a variety of media, including fictional texts, dystopian television shows, and Virtual Reality films. Using the critical theory of media scholars from diverse backgrounds, students will critique VR applications as models to inform their own iterative design process. Students will prototype their own VR narrative films with the tools available through the library makerspaces and media lab. No experience with film or emerging technology necessary.		Hum & Soc Sci Sector (new curriculum only)
VLST 2120-401	Research Experience in Perception	David H Brainard	T 1:45 PM-4:44 PM	In this research course, students will begin by first replicating earlier experiments to measure human visual memory capacity. After several class discussions to discuss ideas, each student will design and conduct their own experiment to further investigate visual and/or familiarity memory.	PSYC4340401
VLST 2170-401	Visual Neuroscience	Alan A Stocker	MWF 10:15 AM-11:14 AM	An introduction to the scientific study of vision, with an emphasis on the biological substrate and its relation to behavior. Topics will typically include physiological optics, transduction of light, visual thresholds, color vision, anatomy and physiology of the visual pathways, and the cognitive neuroscience of vision.	NRSC2217401, PSYC2240401	Living World Sector (all classes)
VLST 2210-401	Introduction to Philosophy of Mind	Ege Yumusak	TR 12:00 PM-12:59 PM	This course will survey several central topics in philosophy of mind, as well as investigate how philosophy of the mind interacts with scientific study of the mind. Among the questions we'll be asking are: What is it to have a mind? What is the relationship between the mind and the brain? Can there be a science of the mind? What can it tell us? What can philosophy contribute to a science of the mind? What is consciousness? What is it to think, to perceive, to act? How are perception, thought, and action related to one another?	PHIL2640401		https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=VLST2210401
VLST 2320-401	The Artist in History,1400-Now	Shira N. Brisman Andre Dombrowski	MW 12:00 PM-12:59 PM	This course is an introduction to the history of art in a global context from the early 1400s to the present. Lectures will introduce students to significant moments in artistic production in both the Western and Eastern hemispheres through focused studies on crucial aspects of exchange between cultures and continents. Covering an era of increasing economic transactions, imperial conquests, and industrialization, this course will build recursively through themes such as: the emergence of authorial identity and models of artistic collaboration, the traffic of artistic materials and techniques and their adaptation in different cultural settings, and the foregrounding of art to both document and initiate political change. Developing vocabularies to discuss painting, sculpture, architecture, and prints, as well as photography and film, students will learn to analyze art's decisive role during times of social transformation, including modernization, colonization, and technological advances. We will also examine the role of broad-reaching media and the advent of art criticism in forming public opinion. Assignments will encourage students to think widely across geographies and study intimately local examples in the Philadelphia museums. This course fulfills Sector III: Arts and Letters and counts towards the History of Art major and minor requirements.	ARTH1020401	Arts & Letters Sector (all classes)
VLST 3010-301	What is Visual Studies?	Tanya A Jung	R 1:45 PM-4:44 PM	Visual Studies 301 is a seminar-format course that challenges students to develop independent ideas about how the eye, the mind and the image that is created therein, all work together to inform our conception of the world at large. Rather than present a unified viewpoint, the course asks the question, "What is visual studies?" by examining parallel and sometimes antagonistic approaches to the ways that human beings understand sight and the concept of visuality. Over the course of the semester, students will discuss and write about various approaches to vision, examining this contested field through the lenses of several disciplines -- including psychology, philosophy, and art history. By parsing and assimilating diverse ideas, students will decide for themselves what are the most pertinent and relevant approaches to the various avenues of research that present themselves in the emerging interdisciplinary field of Visual Studies.
VLST 3030-401	The Rise of Image Culture: History and Theories	Hammam Aldouri	W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM	Today images are everywhere; two centuries ago, they were rare. This seminar considers key historical and theoretical contexts for this change and its social consequences. With the help of some of the strongest critics and theorists of image culture, we will consider five interrelated aspects of the rise of image culture. - First, we will explore how new media and mechanical reproduction has changed the idea of the image over in the free market. - Second, we will explore how images operate through the psyche and gaze and how that operation is tied to social and political power. - Third, we will examine how representations make meaning and form identity in coded systems. - Fourth, we will consider the relationship between visual space and concepts of reality. And finally, we will interrogate how the physical and digital material that images are made from affects their meaning.	ARTH3070401