Foundations in Visual Studies

COMD 512 is a graduate-level theory seminar that asks where our ideas about media, images, and culture actually come from — tracing the lineage from early communication thinkers through Critical Theory, semiotics, ideology and representation debates, and British Cultural Studies, so you can see why people argue about media the way they do. You'll spend the term reading dense foundational texts, leading two seminar presentations, and writing a term essay plus a final essay that puts at least one of these frameworks to work on a concrete case. As a required spring course for the MFA/MA track, it's the methodological backbone the rest of your graduate research leans on: once you can tell a Frankfurt School reading apart from a Hall-style cultural studies one, your thesis arguments stop being intuitions and start being positioned claims.