A Concise Companion to Visual Culture

Chad Eliasteaches at Dartmouth College and publishes on contemporary art. In his research he looks expansively across geographies and media to engage with debates about archival knowledge, the epistemological status of images, the political claims of contemporary visual cultures, and speculative and conceptual futures. Through an attention directed not only to social conflicts, but also to planetary‐scale environmental and technological transformations, his work reconsiders the role of humans within emergent systems of image production and exchange.

Meggan Gouldis a photographer living and working outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she is associate professor of art at the University of New Mexico. Her work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally and is part of many private, corporate, and public collections, for example the DeCordova Museum, the New Mexico Museum of Art, Light Work, and the University of New Mexico Art Museum. Her multifaceted practice uses photography, drawing, sculpture, and installation in an open‐ended dissection of vision and photographic tools.

James J. Hodgeis associate professor in the Department of English and in the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University. His essays on digital aesthetics have been published in Critical Inquiry , Film Criticism , Postmodern Culture , ASAP/Journal , and elsewhere. He is the author of Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art (2019).

Louis Kaplanis professor of history and theory of photography and new media at the University of Toronto. He is the author of numerous books and essays including Photography and Humour (2017) and, most recently, At Wit’s End: The Deadly Discourse on the Jewish Joke (2020). His article “Did you hear the one about Žižek and The Aristocrats?” is forthcoming in CR: The New Centennial Review . Kaplan also collaborates with artist Melissa Shiff on research‐creation projects in augmented and virtual reality.

Gloria C. S. Kimis assistant professor of media and culture at the University of California‐Riverside. Her research specializes in the areas of visual culture, the environmental humanities, and science and technology studies. She has published articles in Configurations, ASAP/J , and Consumption, Markets and Culture .

Eve Meltzeris associate professor of visual studies at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Art History. She is the author of Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (2013). Her current book project, Not‐Me, Mine, Ours: Belonging and Psychic Life after Photography , wagers that the relationship between the psyche and the camera is more intimate and important than we have yet to describe, particularly as it pertains to claims of belonging.

Richard Meyeris Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford University and author of Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth‐Century American Art and What Was Contemporary Art? With Peggy Phelan, he wrote Contact Warhol: Photography without End and co‐curated the exhibition of the same title. With Catherine Lord, he is the author of Art and Queer Culture (an updated edition of which appeared in 2019 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots). He is currently writing Master of the Two Left Feet: Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered , the first book‐length study of a Brooklyn tailor and slipper‐maker who, against all odds, achieved international recognition as a self‐taught painter in the 1940s. A Hirshfield retrospective organized by Meyer will open in October 2022 at the American Folk Art Museum in New York.

W. J. T. Mitchellis the author of numerous books and articles on visual culture, media aesthetics, and iconology. He teaches literature, film, and the visual arts at the University of Chicago, where he is the editor of Critical Inquiry . His books include Iconology , Picture Theory , What Do Pictures Want? , and Image Science . He is currently at work on a book entitled Seeing Through Madness: Insanity, Media, and Visual Culture .

Derek Conrad Murrayis an interdisciplinary theorist specializing in the history, theory, and criticism of contemporary art and visual culture. He is professor of history of art and visual culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Murray is the author of Queering Post‐Black Art: Artists Transforming African–American Identity after Civil Rights (2016) and Mapplethorpe and the Flower: Radical Sexuality and the Limits of Control (2020).

Franny Nudelmanis professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Carleton University in Ottawa, where she teaches US culture and writes about war, protest, and documentary. She is the author of John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War (2004) and Fighting Sleep: The War for the Mind and the US Military (2019) and coeditor, with Sara Blair and Joseph Entin, of Remaking Reality: US Documentary Culture after 1945 (2018).

Michael Petersonis an artist and a scholar of performance and popular cultures. He is professor of art and founding member in Interdisciplinary Theater Studies at the University of Wisconsin‐Madison. Together with Laurie Beth Clark, he co‐founded the arts collaborative Spatuala & Barcode ( www.spatulaandbarcode.net), which has produced social practice participatory projects around the world. The two of them have published in diverse journals and collections and co‐edited a special issue of Performance Research titled “On Generosity.”

Lane Relyeais an art historian and critic who has written about contemporary art for more than thirty‐five years for a variety of books, journals, and museum catalogues. He is a member of the College Art Association and from 2012 to 2015 served as editor‐in‐chief of its quarterly publication Art Journal . His book Your Everyday Art World was published in 2013.

Scott C. Richmondis associate professor in the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, where his work focuses on film and media theory, experimental media practice, and the history of computational media. He has published in Cinema Journal , the Journal of Visual Culture , and Discourse . He is the author of two books: Cinema’s Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating (2016), and Find Each Other: Networks, Affects, and Other Queer Encounters (forthcoming).

A. Joan Saabis the Susan B. Anthony Professor of Art and Art History and vice provost of academic affairs at the University of Rochester. She is the author of For the Millions: American Art and Culture Between the Wars (2004, 2nd edn. 2009); Searching for Siqueiros , written on the digital publishing platform Scalar; and Objects of Vision: Making Sense of What We See (2020).

Marquard Smithis a founder and the editor‐in‐chief of Journal of Visual Culture , programme leader of the Museums and Galleries in Education MA at the UCL Institute of Education, London, and professor of artistic research at Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania.

Sarah E. K. Smithis assistant professor in communication and media studies at Carleton University in Canada. Her research examines contemporary art, cultural labor, museums, and cultural diplomacy. Recent publications include General Idea: Life and Work (2016). She is co‐founder of the North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative, a Fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, and in 2015 held the Canada‐US Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.