Art History and Visual Culture

This Research Cluster for Art History and Visual Culture brings together disciplines and scholars interested in exploring the ways in which images and visual material – from architectural structures to contemporary media images – produce and perform cultural meaning and significance. Rather than treating components of visual culture merely as objects, the historical and contextual conditions of which can be investigated, the Cluster addresses the agency of images in constituting culturally significant forms and practices.

The materials under investigation by members of the Cluster stem from the expansive historical, geographical, and cultural field of global visual culture. Accordingly, the Cluster aims to bring together divergent methodological perspectives and specialist traditions in order to foster interdisciplinary exchange and open up transdisciplinary avenues of research.

In the form of colloquia, summer schools, and retreats, doctoral students will have the opportunity to situate their work within the framework of their own fields, while being exposed to and invited to draw on a broad spectrum of methodological approaches and materials from neighboring disciplines that in different but not incompatible ways address visual culture.