UW-Madison Faculty
Affiliates of the Visual Culture Center
Arnold Alanen, Landscape Architecture, specializes in landscape history, historic preservation, and cultural landscape studies.
Jennifer Angus, Design Studies (formerly Environment, Textiles and Design), uses insects and pattern in her artistic practice to explore ideas of home and comfort.
Sarah Atis, Languages and Cultures of Asia, specializes in oral narratives, poetry, fiction, and ethnography of Turkey.
Mary Beltran, Communication Arts, looks at Latino/a and mixed-race representation in Hollywood film and television and the racial politics and evolution of beauty and body ideals in U.S. popular culture.
William J. Berg, French and Italian, works on 19th and 20th century literature and painting in France and Canada.
Susan Bernstein, English, works on visual and verbal representations of evolutionary theory, race, and gender in Victorian popular culture.
Ksenija Bilbija, Spanish and Portuguese, specializes in contemporary Spanish American writing, cultural studies and gender criticism.
Alda Blanco, Spanish and Portuguese, specializes in contemporary Spanish literature and culture, and has dedicated much of her research and writing to investigating questions of the intersection between gender and cultural production.
Virgina T. Boyd, Design Studies (formerly Environment, Textiles and Design), studies American design of the twentieth-century, currently issues of the contemporary studio furniture movement in relation to furniture history.
Barbara C. Buenger, Art History, works on 20th-century European art history and design, with an emphasis on 20th-century German art history, modern women artists and modern Italian art.
Rick Cai, Psychology, uses a combination of psychophysics, visual illusions, modeling and patient studies to study the human visual system and perception.
Jill Casid, Art History, combines, in her Visual Culture Studies practice, archival research (in early modern to modern) with speculative theorizing (particularly in the areas of queer, feminist, and postcolonial studies) and production in photography and slide-show performance. She has just begun a new book project, “The Volatile Image: Other Histories of Photography,” that reconsiders photography as a complex and unstable medium.
Preeti Chopra, Languages and Cultures of Asia and Design Studies (formerly Environment, Textiles and Design), is an architectural and urban historian whose work examines buildings, cities, and the larger cultural landscape through the lenses of post-colonial theory and the politics of memory.
Laurie Beth Clark, Art, has works in progress on (1) trauma memorials, (2) the performance of credibility, and (3) the persistence of material culture in the electronic age.
Kelly Conway, Communication Arts, works on French film of all eras, women's history and gender studies, and the intersections between film and other forms of popular culture.
Susan Cook, Music, is writing a history of ragtime dance that explores the gendered and racialized meanings of embodied cultural practices.
Michael Curtin, Communication Arts and Global Studies, is working on a book manuscript entitled Media Capital: The Cultural Geography of Globalization.
Julie D'acci, Women's Studies, specializes in cultural theory, media theory, feminist theory, and US television history.
Thomas E.A. Dale, Art History, specializes in Early Christian, Medieval and Byzantine art; Romanesque art (representations of the body); San Marco in Venice; the cult of the saints; cultural appropriation.
Samuel Dennis Jr., Landscape Architecture, Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies is both a geographer and a landscape architect interested in the idea of landscape as a visual practice.
Vinay Dharwadker, Languages and Cultures of Asia, works on the historical and cultural contexts of recent Indian writing and the major literary movements since independence.
Wei Dong, Design Studies (formerly Environment, Textiles and Design), specializes in the use of both manual and digital media to visualize buildings and their associated interior and exterior spaces.
Greg Downey, Journalism & Mass Communication,
Library & Information Studies, works on the history and geography of information, communication technology and labor.
Henry J. Drewal, Art History, Afro-American Studies, is a specialist in African and African diaspora art.
Juan Egea, Spanish and Portuguese, is working on the relations between poetry and film and researching Becquer's poetry in the context of the cultural production of the second part of the nineteenth century in Spain.
Jo Ellen Fair, Journalism and Mass Communication, examines the ways in which US broadcast news organizations represent conflict in Africa.
Susan Friedman, English, Women's Studies, has teaching and research interests in women's art, film, and the intersections between literature, visual culture, and cultural studies in global context.
Gail L. Geiger, Art History, specializes in patronage of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque period.
Kenneth M. George, Anthropology, is working on the cultural politics of contemporary Indonesian Islamic art.
Aristotle Georgiades, Art, makes sculptures about the changing nature of work in the new economy and is part of a collaborative team which designs and executes public artworks.
Beverly Gordon, Design Studies (formerly Environment, Textiles and Design), focuses particularly on objects made and used in domestic contexts throughout the world, and on the ways people "aestheticize" their enviornments.
Lisa Gralnick, Art teaches beginning to graduate level classes in metalsmithing and jewelry arts.
Camille Guérin Gonzales, History and Chican@ and Latin@ Studies, is trained as a historian of U.S. labor and immigration. She now places these fields in comparative, transnational, and interdisciplinary perspectives.
Dawnene Hassett, Curriculum and Instruction, researches the educational implications of new technologies and new forms of texts in early reading instruction.
Paola Hernández, Spanish and Portuguese focuses on contemporary Latin American theatre and performance.
Freida High (Wasikhongo Tesfagiorgis), Afro-American Studies, is a painter whose research interests include modern and postmodern African diaspora art history, including visual culture, critical race theory and primitivism.
Stephen Hilyard, Art, is a conceptual artist who works in multiple media. He teaches digital arts in the Department of Art.
John Hitchckock, Art is an artist whose current works are a blend of printmaking, digital imaging, video, and installation that depict personal, social, and political views.
Nicole Huang, East Asian Languages and Literature, works on popular cultures from the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-76), the literary underground, and the Chinese Diaspora
Theresa Kelley, English, has worked extensively on links between the visual arts and Romantic culture. She is at present writing a book on the role of botany and botanical illustration in Romanticism.
Mary Layoun, Comparative Literature, works on comics and verbal and visual narrative in Japan.
James Leary, Folklore, looks at expressive culture in Wisconsin among Hmong, Woodland Indians, musical instrument makers, folk artists, and other groups.
Jean B. Lee, History, is working on a book on the creation and shaping of the memory (and therefore the meaning) of the revolution, from the battles of Lexington and Concord (1775) through the Centennial of Independence (1876).
Caroline Levine, English, specialize in nineteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetics, with a focus on public battles over works of art, theories of realism, and the relations between art and politics.
Tomislav Longinovic, Slavic Studies, is interested in East European Cinema and contributing editor to ARTMargin, a journal of East European Visual Culture.
Venkat Mani, German, has teaching and research interests in 19th and 20th century German and European literatures, literature written by authors of non-German heritages, feminist literature, and gay and lesbian literature; theories of multiculturalism, postcolonialism, globalization, and cosmopolitanism.
Nancy Rose Marshall, Art History, works on a range of issues in nineteenth-century French and British Visual Culture.
Anne Smart Martin, Art History, is working on a book project which studies Virginia rural stores to understand the rise of consumerism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
Anne McClintock, English, is interested in the emergence of the eye as the privileged organ of knowledge, in relation to commodity spectacle and the sex trade (porn, S/M, stripping); technologies of the eye ; relations between visual culture and power, and theories of visual culture.
Michael Jay McClure, Art, specializes in new media, contemporary theories of representation and post-modernity, theories of gender, queer theory, modern and contemporary painting and sculpture, film studies, and, more generally, the History of Twentieth Century American and European Art and visual culture
Jon McKenzie, English, focuses on modes of performative power—including discursive, embodied, and algorithmic—and their role in America’s “global war on terror.”
Ruben Medina, Chicano Studies, studies contemporary Mexican and Chicano film and expressive culture.
Claudia Melrose, Dance, researches the performative and visual arts of several West African peoples in the specific historical, political, and geographic contexts of the Carribean, Brazil, and the U.S.
Dennis Miller, Art, is a graphic designer, typographer, and typefounder. His work typically encompasses cross-disciplinary,multi-media projects that focus on education and public service.
Greg Mitman, History of Science, works on the visual culture of science and medicine, particularly the relationships between science and film..
J.J. Murphy, Communication Arts, is an independent filmmaker, who is currently completing a book on how American independent feature films differ from mainstream Hollywood films in terms of their scripts.
Mark Nelson, Design Studies (formerly Environment, Textiles and Design), examines relationships between the human body and the built environment, using body modification as a conceptual foundation.
Lynn Nyhart, History of Science, is researching the history of natural history museum displays and the intersections of what were historically viewed as "high" and "low" scientific cultures.
Tejumola Olaniyan, African Languages and Literature, does work on political cartooning in Africa, with side considerations of popular political painting.
Michael Peterson, Theatre and Drama, works on performance and/as popular culture and is at work on a book titled Las Vegas Culture.
Quitman Phillips, Art History, has recently taken up the Visual Culture of popular Buddhism in medieval Japan with a special emphasis on its ritual dimensions.
Guido Podesta, Spanish and Portuguese, studies 19th century Latin American photography.
Sheila Reaves, Life Sciences Communication, does research on the ethics and effects of digital manipulation in the media.
Steve Ridgley , East Asian Languages and Literature, studies modern Japanese literature, film, and popular culture with a special interest in counterculture.
Douglas Rosenberg, Art, addresses meta-narrative and the re-corporealization of the body via mediated performance.
Patrick Rumble, French and Italian, works on 20th century Italian culture, cinema, and critical theory.
Ellen Sapega, Spanish and Portuguese, studies the public art and architecture produced Portugal and Lusophone Africa under the Salazar regime (1928-1974).
Diane Sheehan, Design Studies (formerly Environment, Textiles and Design), researches and produces woven textiles as an expression of complex and inexorably evolving binary pattern systems.
Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, English, works on 19th and 20th Century African American literature and visual culture.
Janet Silbernagel, Landscape Architecture, explores how cultural landscape patterning influences both ecological dynamics and changing cultural knowledge of place, in order to inform holistic, dynamic, meaningful bio-cultural conservation designs.
Gail Simpson, Art, is a sculptor working in the areas of community-based public art and public space design.
Ben Singer, Communication Arts, studies early cinema, sensationalism, modernist criticism and avant-garde film.
Ahna Skop, Genetics and Medical Genetics, directs a lab that is interested in understanding the mechanisms required during cell division throughout embryonic development.
Aliko Songolo, French and Italian, works on African Francophone cinema.
Kurt Squire, Curriculum and Instruction
Michael Streibel, Curriculum and Instruction, currently studies the use of photography in education for visual cultural understanding.
R. Anderson Sutton, Music, is studying the interaction of music and television in Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, and Korea), with particular focus on popular music videos and satellite delivery systems, such as MTV.
Mike Vanden Heuvel, Theatre & Drama, Integrated Liberal Studies, works on the interdisciplinary interactions between theatre and science, particularly as it pertains to experimental and avant-garde performance.
Joseph Varga, Theatre and Drama, is a professional set designer working in a variety of regional theatre companies; a special area of interest is original site-specific theatre productions developed in indigenous communities across the country.
Lee Palmer Wandel, History, works on the interplay of images, ritual, and theology in the Christian liturgies of communion.
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