Sightlines

VCS students are cultural producers who “make” writing. The award-winning VCS faculty guide them. We illuminate paths of interdisciplinary thinking and inquiry, and then get out of the way so that students can dive into the histories of visual culture and identify intellectual allies whose scholarship will aid their analyses. VCS students demonstrate their progress in seminar papers, oral presentations, short-form articles, and ultimately eight-thousand-word theses. Students deliver formal talks about their theses in the VCS Annual Spring Symposium and reframe their theses for a broad readership to be published in Sightlines as one of the culminating activities of the VCS program.

After such preparation, graduating students take jobs in the cultural sector as arts administrators, critics, curators, editors, educators, journalists, and working artists with research-driven practices. Some VCS alumni continue with graduate study, deciding to pursue the Ph.D. in Visual Studies, Performance Studies, Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature, Art History, Anthropology, and other disciplines at institutions in the US and elsewhere. The diversity of their routes is a solid measure of their training and their passion.