Visual StudiesI am interested in human vision, machine vision, and computational modeling of visual processing. My primary research is concerned with how the visual system estimates object properties from the information available in the light signal incident at the eye. To study this general problem, I conduct psychophysical experiments to investigate questions such as how object color appearance is related to object surface properties under a wide range of illumination conditions and how color is used to identify objects. In addition, I am interested in developing machine visual systems that can mimic human...
PEOPLE
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Professor of Psychology
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Assistant Professor of the History of Art and Visual Studies
Shira Brisman is a historian of early modern art. Her current research investigates the boundaries between privacy and society, patterns and abberations, religious modes of thinking and categories of secularization.
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Adam Seybert Professor in Moral and Intellectual Philosophy and Director of Visual Studies
Gary Hatfield (PhD, University of Wisconsin–Madison) taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkins before coming to Penn in 1987. He works in the history of modern philosophy, the philosophy of psychology, theories of vision, and the philosophy of science. He is a member of the MindCore initiative, the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and the Center for Neuroaesthetics. He has long been fascinated by visual perception and the mind–body problem.
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College of Women Class of 1963 Professor
Renata Holod is Professor, and Curator in the Near East Section, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. She received her BA in Islamic Studies from the University of Toronto, MA in the History of Art from University of Michigan and Ph.D. in Fine Arts from Harvard University. Professor Holod has served as Convenor, Steering Committee Member, and Master Jury Chair of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.
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Adjunct Professor in Fine Arts
Sharka Hyland teaches courses on typography and visual communication, as well as visual studies. She has received awards from the American Association of Museums, American Federation of Arts, and American Institute of Graphic Arts. Her text-based drawings have been exhibited in solo and group shows, most recently at Gallery Joe in Philadelphia and at Josee Bienvenu Gallery in New York.
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Executive Director, Wharton Neuroscience Initiative
Elizabeth (Zab) Johnson is the executive director and senior fellow of the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative. Her research focuses on vision and visual behavior. Her work spans physiological approaches in the retina and early visual cortex to using eye tracking to investigate how human observers look and navigate through the world, how these processes unfold over time and with experience, and the role of social cognition and decision making in these processes. She is an expert on color vision. She received her PhD in Neural Science at New York University.
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Assistant Dean for Advising and Lecturer in Visual Studies
Dr. Jung holds a M.A in Art History and Archaeology from the University of Missouri and a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Maryland. Her research interests include the cultural biography of images and she currently teaches courses in the History of Art department and the Visual Studies program.
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Professor of the History of Art and Visual Studies
Michael Leja (Ph.D., Harvard) is a Professor in the History of Art and the Visual Studies Program Director. Professor Leja studies the visual arts in various media (painting, sculpture, film, photography, prints, illustrations) in the 19th and 20th centuries, primarily in the United States. His work is interdisciplinary and strives to understand visual artifacts in relation to contemporary cultural, social, political, and intellectual developments. He is especially interested in examining the interactions between works of art and particular audiences...
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Professor and Chair of Fine Arts
Lum is concerned with the dialectics of the private and public construction of identity, space and politics. He is well-known as a conceptual artist for his work in photography and sculpture addressing the public realm. Major art exhibitions, including the Sao Paulo Art Bienal, Sydney Biennale, Venice Biennale, the 2000 Shanghai Biennale, the 2002 Documenta XI in Kassel, Germany, the 2006 Liverpool Biennial, the 2007 Istanbul Biennial, the 2008 Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, Moscow Biennale 2011, and the Whitney Biennial 2014.
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Senior Lecturer, Photography
Gabriel Martinez, a Cuban-American visual artist originally from Miami, Florida, works largely with photography, performance and installation. Martinez was a Pew Fellowship in the Arts recipient in 2001 and was granted a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship in 2003. He has received two Individual Artists Grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.