The Handbook of Visual Culture

Visual culture has become one of the most dynamic fields of scholarship, a reflection of how the study of human culture increasingly requires distinctively visual ways of thinking and methods of analysis. Bringing together leading international scholars to assess all aspects of visual culture, the Handbookaims to provide a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the subject. The Handbook embraces the extraordinary range of disciplines which now engage in the study of the visual - film and photography, television, fashion, visual arts, digital media, geography, philosophy, architecture, material culture, sociology, cultural studies and art history. Throughout, the Handbook is responsive to the cross-disciplinary nature of many of the key questions raised in visual culture around digitization, globalization, cyberculture, surveillance, spectacle, and the role of art. The Handbookguides readers new to the area, as well as experienced researchers, into the topics, issues and questions that have emerged in the study of visual culture since the start of the new millennium, conveying the boldness, excitement and vitality of the subject.

Ian Heywood is Visiting Research Fellow at the Lancaster Centre for Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University, UK, and author of Social Theories of Art: A Critique among other works. Barry Sandywell is Honorary Research Fellow in Social Theory in the Department of Sociology, University of York, UK. He is author of Dictionary of Visual Discourse. A Dialectical Lexicon of Terms and Logological Investigation, among other works, and is co-editor with Ian Heywood of Interpreting Visual Culture: Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Visual. Michael Gardiner is Professor of Sociology, University of Western Ontario, Canada. Gunalan Nadarajan is Vice Provost for Research, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, USA. Catherine Soussloff is Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture, University of California, Santa Cruz Division, USA.