Visual Culture: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies

'Visual Culture: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies' aims to map both the contemporary field of Visual Culture Studies and its historical genealogies.

Its objectives are: first, to chart the emergence of Visual Culture Studies, while engaging critically with its central achievements. Second, to create an historical and theoretical genealogy of visual culture, and provide foundational primary and secondary texts. Third, to include a ‘case study’ in each of the four volumes, offering hands-on pedagogic opportunities for readers to reflect critically upon the interdisciplinary nature of visual culture.

In achieving these objectives, Volume I examines ‘What Is Visual Culture Studies’ and includes texts by academics in the field such as Stuart Hall, Michael Ann Holly, and Nicholas Mirzoeff. Volume II offers the ‘Histories, Archaeologies and Genealogies of Visual Culture’ from, for instance, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid and Vitruvius through to Augustine, Avicenna, Hildegard of Bingen, as well as Alberti, Vasari, Descartes, Newton, and the modern thinkers Kant, Marx, Freud, Fanon and Bhabha. Volume III considers the many ‘Spaces of Visual Culture’, from the modern spaces analysed by Bentham, Nochlin, Simmel, Alloula, Foucault and Krauss; to the global spaces as examined by Said, Spivak, Baudrillard, Hardt and Negri. Volume IV provides an understanding of the ‘Experiences of Visual Culture’ including a genealogy from Classical vision through to digital cinema, as well as a consideration of the modalities of vision by, for instance, Ginzburg, Trinh Minh-ha, McLuhan, and Mulvey.

Giovanna Morra

Research Interests

Modern and contemporary art; psychoanalysis, autographic narratives, subjectivity, and intimacy; art-making, materiality, and the spaces of practice, critical theory; translation, transcultural aesthetics and
diaspora.

Current Research

My research interests are in modern and contemporary art; critical theory; psychoanalysis as a theory and practice; spaces of practice – specifically, the writer’s study, artist’s studio, gallery, and psychoanalytic consulting room; autographic narratives and subjectivity; translation and transcultural aesthetics; the question of materiality as its pertains to art-making.

I am presently working on a single-authored books entitled ‘Inside the Freud Museum: Contemporary Art and Psychoanalysis’. In it I consider debates opened up by the 50 contemporary art exhibitions held at the Museum over the past 25 years. I examine issues raised by the art, the museum and psychoanalysis, such as the site specific nature of the Museum; questions of archaeology, archives and antiquities; memory, migration and trauma; dreams, delusions, desire and death; and autobiography and the patient ‘case history’. I am particularly interested in the way these psychoanalytic issues are inflected and transformed by the artistic interventions in the Museum. The book also includes a chapter on the Vienna Freud Museum and the contemporary art collection housed and displayed there.

I have written on the work of many contemporary artists, including, Faisal Abdu' Allah, Chantal Akerman, William Cobbing, Tacita Dean, Mona Hatoum, Barbara Kruger, Susan pui san Lok, Adrian Piper, Elizabeth Price, Robert Rauschenberg, Mario Rossi, Pam Skelton, Emma Talbot, Erika Tan, and Chris Wainwright.

I have published on translation and the visual arts over many years. Beginning with a consideration of literary and Biblical narratives and their translation into visual arts practices (painting and drawing, for instance), I have recently extended this work into an interrogation of transcultural aesthetics, gender, and sexuality, wherein I have contemplated questions of intimacy, skin, diaspora and autographic narratives.

As a Founder and Principal Editor of the 'Journal of Visual Culture' (2000- onwards) and a Founder of the cultural theory journal 'Parallax' (Editor 1993-1998), I have been involved in provoking and establishing debates in critical theory and its relationship to a wide range of disciplines, from art history to gender studies, postcolonial theory, and cultural studies. These publications have also critically interrogated and simultaneously established visual culture studies as a new field of inquiry in the academy.