An innovative graduate program with a unique emphasis on visual and cultural representation, Rochester's Visual and Cultural Studies Program provides students with an opportunity to study critically and analyze culture from a social-historical perspective. The program stresses interpretation of art, film, and media within historical and ideological frameworks. Because the main contributing faculty members work in art and art history, film studies, and comparative literature, students are able to relate recent developments in literary and cultural theory to visual works and investigate the interrelationships between visual texts and critical theory. All students must participate in the Visual and Cultural Studies Colloquium, a seminar at which faculty members and graduate students present and discuss papers. After this, they take a qualifying exam, based on their reading and preliminary work on their dissertation.
Students serve as teaching assistants for a number of introductory courses.
The University's libraries contain holdings of 2.5 million volumes and 16,000 periodicals. The Visual Resource Collection at the University consists of more than 140,000 slides and mounted pictures. The University's Memorial Art Gallery also maintains its own library of 17,000 books and bound periodicals. The Film Studies Center has several thousand films and videotapes available for viewing. Students can use the film and photograph collections at the world-renowned International Museum of Photography in the George Eastman House in Rochester.