Visual studies dual-title doctoral program graduates first cohort

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State’s dual-title visual studies doctoral program achieved a significant milestone this summer as its first cohort received their degrees.

Six students completed their doctorate in the interdisciplinary program — Ibis Sierra Audivert, Camila Gutiérrez Fuentes, Hannah A. Matangos, Robert Nguyen, Jacqueline García Suárez and Chrisann Zuerner.

“We are proud of their accomplishment and excited about their future,” said Christopher Reed, distinguished professor of English, who co-directs the program with Daniel Purdy, professor of German studies.

Established in 2017, the program — known as VSTUD for short — brings together students and faculty from the College of the Liberal Arts, the College of Arts and Architecture and the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. Enrollment is open to students already enrolled in doctoral programs offered by the departments of Art History; Comparative Literature; English; French and Francophone Studies; Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures; and Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese prior to the students’ doctoral candidacy.

“We recognized that a lot of people in the languages were doing excellent work using visual elements, but it wasn’t very recognizable,” Reed said. “We wanted to create something that would bring people together in topics with a visual component and make it legible to the outside world.”

“It allows students to speak across disciplines through a bona fide academic degree that has its own specialized knowledge,” Purdy added. “We just thought this was something important — that everyone needs to be able to understand, interpret and criticize visual images and not just take them as they are.”

As part of the curriculum, students are required to take two introductory courses: VSTUD 501, which focuses on approaches to visual culture in a variety of historical and geographical contexts; and VSTUD 502, which examines the visual aspects of the digital world.

From there, students take three elective seminars, one of which must be in a department other than the one of their degree program. Among the courses offered this fall are “Issues in Nineteenth-Century Photography"; “Gothic Haunts: The German-English Nexus” (taught by Purdy); and “A World of their Own: The Poetics and Material Culture of Imperial Spain.”

“Bringing the students together in the (VSTUD) 501 course is fun and interesting, given their various interests,” said Reed, who is teaching the course this fall. “We try to reflect the interests of the students. So, if they are interested in film, we can focus on film. Or focus on dance. But they’re often intrigued by what their fellow students are doing, and by the methodologies that are specific to looking at visual things, noticing visual detail, framing arguments using visual elements. They’re finding all these areas of overlap. And the nice thing about the visual is that you don’t need to know the language — it allows them to investigate other students’ enthusiasms and really participate in the conversation.”

“For me, teaching the courses is a joy,” Purdy said. “The students are clever and smart, and often very experimental and looking to try something different. As a professor, the fun of teaching these classes is that you learn a lot about what your graduate students are working on. They learn from us, and we learn from them.”

The program also was designed with the intent of giving students a leg up in the academic job market. And judging by the post-graduation plans of the six graduates, it’s working.

Sierra Audivert, who received her dual-title doctorate in Spanish and visual studies, was recently hired as a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies and fellow of the Consortium for Faculty Diversity at Davidson College. She said the program allowed her to gain theoretical and analytical skills to examine photography, film, art, music and other media through the lens of feminism, race, memory, and aesthetics.

“Thanks to this program I was able to expand my research archive and examine literary texts in dialogue with film and photography, which enriched my doctoral research, and particularly, my analysis of Latin American literature from a multi-artistic and sociocultural perspective,” Sierra Audivert said. “I particularly enjoyed Krista Brune’s course about Luso-Afro-Brazilian film and Marco Martinez’s seminar on Latin American photography. To this date, the study of different visual materials continues to be not only an important part of my scholarly work but also my teaching pedagogy.”

García Suárez, who also received a dual-tile doctorate in Spanish and visual studies, landed a position as an assistant professor of Caribbean studies at Columbia University. She said the visual studies curriculum significantly informed her dissertation and provided a great foundation in visual theories and critical approaches.

“The humanities have become increasingly visual, and initiatives such as the visual studies program are critical in ensuring that graduate students are not only successful in the field but also able to approach their research as a multidimensional practice where critical thinking meets the sensorial,” García Suárez said. “For me, this program was a unique opportunity to complement my formation as a literature scholar by allowing for meaningful — and quite often unforeseen — dialogue between literary works and an array of visual phenomena and media concerned with underrepresented bodies.”

After completing her doctorate in comparative literature and visual studies, Gutiérrez Fuentes accepted a faculty position at her undergraduate alma mater, the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. She believes the dual-title made her more visible to the position’s hiring committee, given her ability to work as a comparatist across media, especially virtual/digital media.

“My current appointment is with the Department of Communications and the interdisciplinary program called ‘College,’ which is modeled after the liberal arts system of the United States — so a literature-only person would not have quite worked for what they needed,” Gutiérrez Fuentes said. “My first task this semester will be to develop a first-year interdisciplinary seminar for students in STEM, humanities and social sciences. I am also in charge of developing a video games major in the next couple of years. Basically, they wanted someone who could imagine the humanities in higher ed in this innovative way, and I think the VSTUD program gave me that newer perspective.”

Nguyen, who completed his doctorate in visual studies and English, will remain at Penn State as a postdoctoral teaching fellow. Having worked in theater, film and photography, he said the program was the perfect opportunity to combine his creative and academic interests. It also focused his choice of seminar projects, which included papers on advertising catalogs of American arts and crafts movement firms in the early 20th century, the websites of Ernest Hemingway-themed restaurants and products, and the various ways screens are depicted in recent movies and TV shows.

“I’m proud to be a member of the first graduating cohort of the program — it has been an integral part of my graduate education, and my appreciation for what it offers has grown since I started at Penn State,” Nguyen said. “While the program directly helped shape my dissertation project on film and television depictions of Silicon Valley, it also allowed me to gain a foundational understanding of what visual studies can be and how it can help us make sense of our culture, through both expected objects of humanities analysis, like paintings and films, as well as less unexpected ones, like consumer products and computing interfaces.”

Matangos and Zuerner both completed their doctorates in German and visual studies. Zuerner accepted a position as assistant professor of German at the University of Virginia. Her dissertation dealt with the ways that photographs, furniture and other household items hold and convey memories of war in novels written by contemporary women authors from Austria, Switzerland and Eastern Europe.

Matangos, meanwhile, is now working with the arts organizations Art of the Rural and State College-based 3 Dots Downtown. Art of the Rural’s director was particularly impressed with the website she created as part of her work on the “Field Language: The Painting and Poetry of Warren & Jane Rohrer” exhibition at Penn State’s Palmer Museum of Art.

Matangos said the projects she collaborated on with her fellow students were particularly valuable. They included the cross-disciplinary “Unraveling the Anthropocene” podcast and the “(Co)Figurations” series through the grad student-led Liberal Arts Collective.

“Being part of the visual studies program at Penn State strengthened my passion for thinking, working and collaborating across disciplines while advocating for the arts and humanities,” Matangos said. “Through the program, I met and befriended professors, scholars and fellow graduate students from outside of my home department of German, leading to an exploration of my interests in a hands-on way.”

With a solid foundation now in place, the key is to continue growing the visual studies program, Reed said.

“We did not invent the quality visual studies scholarly work going on at Penn State — that was there all along. This is just a great way to shine a spotlight on that work,” he said. “We would like to see more students take the opportunity to enroll. We’re also very open to including more departments, and we hope more people see our program as an advantage.”