European Visual Cultures Series

University of Wales Press

Editors: Elaine Canning, Rachael Langford & Margaret Topping

The University of Wales Press is launching a new series on European Visual Cultures, comprising of three distinct strands:

• Monographs in European Visual Cultures
• Introductions to European Visual Cultures
• Intersections: European Visual Cultures at the Boundaries, a forum for edited collections.

The series responds to, and reflects, significant shifts in Arts and Humanities research towards an emphasis on inter-disciplinarity, as well as tapping into the marked ascendancy of visual culture as an object of research and study at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Media such as photography and video installation are at the forefront of these trends, and the series provides a forum for innovative engagement with, and enquiry into, radical new forms of cultural production.

The European Visual Cultures series welcomes contributions on a range of aesthetic media and cultural formations, including

• photography
• fine arts
• video installation and other new media
• performance art
• sculpture
• film
• theatre
• museology (curation and display)

We also consider proposals on the graphic novel to the extent that analysis intersects with broader issues in the field of visual cultures, and architecture and design where the emphasis is on visual and spatial analysis and is culturally embedded.

Key features of the series are its emphasis on the status of these media as ideological and cultural – as much as aesthetic – constructs and on the relationships of these media to other fields and discourses, including

• cultural history
• literary production and criticism
• adaptation
• philosophy
• gender and sexuality research
• journalism and media studies
• migration and mobility studies
• social sciences
• politics etc.

It promotes investigation into the relationships of complementarity, tension and disjuncture that emerge when visual and other narratives or media are juxtaposed or intersect. In this, it provides a forum for testing and extending disciplinary, theoretical and conceptual boundaries, and for uncovering the synergies between them. The series conceives of Europe in broad geographical and cultural terms, with a particular interest in the exchanges, transactions and displacements that link Europe to global contexts.

Each of the series’ strands manifests these features by means of their differing objectives and outcomes. For specialist readers, the Monographs in European Visual Cultures and Intersections: European Visual Cultures at the Boundaries provide high-level debate that breaks new ground through the originality of the theoretical frames introduced and the range of media with which the studies interact. For non-specialist readers, in contrast, the Introductions to European Visual Cultures open up new perspectives on the visual culture that surrounds us; they aim to counter ‘passive vision’ by demonstrating the constructedness, in cultural and ideological terms, of everyday visual media ranging from advertisements to newspaper photographs. They also provide a ‘training guide’ for a variety of forms of interpretation, including broad-based understanding of a particular visual medium, more directed visual readings of individual movements and artists, or an appreciation of historically/politically-conditioned moments of cultural production.

The Monographs in European Visual Cultures

• provide cutting-edge, culturally-embedded reassessments of canonical works and movements in light of new interpretative frameworks
• engage with innovative and exciting developments in the constantly evolving field of visual cultures
• foreground neglected areas of visual culture
• provoke and take up discussions of cultural strategies and legacies that define production of visual media; and provide a forum for publication of applied and theoretical debate to both early-career researchers and established scholars.

The Intersections: European Visual Cultures at the Boundaries strand

• promotes interdisciplinarity through an emphasis on crossing national and/or theoretical boundaries
• offers contrapuntal, rather than narrowly comparative, readings
• questions, extends and/or transcends the cultural, generic or aesthetic specificities of the theoretical models relied on by individual disciplines in order to arrive at new modes of interpretation.

The Introductions to European Visual Cultures

• produce lively, authoritative and accessible introductions to the field of visual cultures
• familiarise students and teachers with key theoretical models and approaches for studying visual cultures
• ‘train’ readers for independent interpretation of a range of visual media, by offering appropriately-pitched critical readings of visual production
• introduce students and teachers to important practitioners and theorists in the field of visual cultures working in a range of national contexts (in translation, where non-anglophone)
• examine distinctive trends and developments within visual cultures, situating them within a national and/or international framework.

Editorial Board

Professor Mieke Bal Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, Netherlands
Professor Paul Cooke Dept of German, Russian and Slavonic Studies University of Leeds, UK
Professor Mark Durden Newport School of Art, Media and Design University of Wales, Newport, UK Professor Anne Freadman School of Languages & Linguistics The University of Melbourne, Australia Professor Andrea Noble School of Modern Languages and Cultures University of Durham, UK
Dr María Pilar Rodríguez Universidad de Deusto, Spain
Dr Eric Thau Languages & Literatures of Europe & the Americas University of Hawai'i at Manoa, USA

Contact

If you are interested in writing for this series please contact:

Elaine Canning E.Canning@swansea.ac.uk
Rachael Langford LangfordRE@cardiff.ac.uk
Margaret Topping ToppingM@cardiff.ac.uk

Alternatively, the proposal questionnaire can be downloaded from the University Of Wales Press. Completed questionnaires should be sent to one of the series editors.