These texts represent both the formation of visual culture, and the ways in which it has transformed, and continues to transform, our understanding and experience of the world as a visual domain.

Visual Culture Studies presents 13 engaging and detailed interviews with some of the most influential intellectuals working today on the objects, subjects, media and environments of visual culture. Exploring historical and theoretical questions of vision, the visual and visuality, this collection reveals the provocative insights of these thinkers as they have contributed in exhilarating ways to disturbing the parameters of more traditional areas of study across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In so doing they have key roles in establishing Visual Culture Studies as a significant field of inquiry. Each interview draws out the interests and commitments of the interviewee to critically interrogate the past, present and future possibilities of Visual Culture Studies and visual culture itself. The discussions concentrate on three broad areas of deliberation: The intellectual and institutional status of Visual Culture Studies. The histories, genealogies and archaeologies of visual culture and its study. The diverse ways in which the experiences of vision, and the visual, can be articulated and mobilized to political, aesthetic and ethical ends. This book demonstrates the intellectual significance of Visual Culture Studies, and the ongoing importance of the study of the visual. Marquard Smith is Reader in Visual and Material Culture at Kingston University, London, and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Visual Culture.

Provides a broad view of the history and current state of scholarship on the art of the ancient Near East This book covers the aesthetic traditions of Mesopotamia, Iran, Anatolia, and the Levant, from Neolithic times to the end of the Achaemenid Persian Empire around 330 BCE. It describes and examines the field from a variety of critical perspectives: across approaches and interpretive frameworks, key explanatory concepts, materials and selected media and formats, and zones of interaction. This important work also addresses both traditional and emerging categories of material, intellectual perspectives, and research priorities. The book covers geography and chronology, context and setting, medium and scale, while acknowledging the diversity of regional and cultural traditions and the uneven survival of evidence. Part One of the book considers the methodologies and approaches that the field has drawn on and refined. Part Two addresses terms and concepts critical to understanding the subjects and formal characteristics of the Near Eastern material record, including the intellectual frameworks within which monuments have been approached and interpreted. Part Three surveys the field’s most distinctive and characteristic genres, with special reference to Mesopotamian art and architecture. Part Four considers involvement with artistic traditions across a broader reach, examining connections with Egypt, the Aegean, and the Mediterranean. And finally, Part Five addresses intersections with the closely allied discipline of archaeology and the institutional stewardship of cultural heritage in the modern Middle East. Told from multiple perspectives, A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Art is an enlightening, must-have book for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of ancient Near East art and Near East history as well as those interested in history and art history.

These texts represent both the formation of visual culture, and the ways in which it has transformed, and continues to transform, our understanding and experience of the world as a visual domain.

This volume is a collection of thirteen essays built around the question ‘what is the supernatural, and how, and why, has it changed over time?’ It is divided into two complementary sections; the first focussing on research on the discourse of the supernatural (including the miraculous) located in the medieval and early modern eras, and the second consisting of a set of test-cases involving research on the uncanny, often articulated in a post-Freudian sense, as expressed in modern literature, film and art. The eclectic and prismatic approach pursued via a variety of test-cases of the supernatural in this book gives rise to a clear, comparative and diachronic study of the main characteristics of the supernatural.

These texts represent both the formation of visual culture, and the ways in which it has transformed, and continues to transform, our understanding and experience of the world as a visual domain.