University News

UB establishes ‘mega’ department of visual studies

Center for the Arts

Center for the Arts is home to a new academic department. (Photo: Douglas Levere, BA ’89)

Only a comparative handful of U.S. and Canadian universities offer an academic concentration in the emerging discipline of visual studies, which involves not only the visual arts and art history, but also cultural studies, science studies, philosophy, history, perception theory, comparative literature and anthropology.

UB recently joined this impressive group when it merged its Department of Art History and Department of Art into a new “mega” Department of Visual Studies in the UB College of Arts and Sciences.

“Visual Studies” is not only the new department’s name, but also one of its academic tracks. David Schirm, professor of art and chair of the department, expects it to become a “signature center of excellence” in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Schirm says artists “increasingly use language, sound, digital images, virtual reality and robotics, often in powerful combinations, to critique politics, culture, corporate practice and the manipulation of a populace through the use of technology.”

Visual studies, he explains, “embraces these new topics and mediums, examines how and why artists select and encode certain images, and how those images are perceived, decoded and contextualized by the audience.”

The department will continue to make available all degree programs offered by the former art and art history departments, and will add a BA, BFA and MA in visual studies.