Visual Practices Across the University

We live in a world saturated in images, and yet a university education is still overwhelmingly linguistic and mathematical. Art history and visual studies, the two disciplines that study images, still work mainly with fine art and mass media. This book, the first of its kind, studies the production and interpretation of images in all the faculties and departments of a university. Fine art is here, and popular culture: but so is biology, speech therapy, the study of medieval inscriptions, of viruses, of whales, of the bottom of the ocean, and even of porcelain teeth and Cheddar cheese. The book contains detailed explanations of the ways images are made and interpreted: it does not popularize or bend different practices into the shape of some over-arching theory. The Introduction is an entirely new theorization of the study of images including a proposal that images can introduce students in all fields—in science and in the humanities—to the full range and unexpected coherence of the university as a whole. Without the study of images, universities are unified in name only: through images, students can find their place in the full spectrum of contemporary intellectual life.