This collection comprises interviews with an array of influential US and European intellectuals from across the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences working today on visual culture within the university context and beyond. As academics, scholars, researchers, and teachers with an interest in questions of vision, the visual, and visuality, they have all contributed in exhilarating and provocative ways to disturbing the parameters of more traditional areas of study - such as History, Literature, Art History, Sociology, Religious Studies, Government, and Communication Studies. In so doing, they have played a significant part in the possibility of establishing Visual Culture Studies as a field of inquiry. Following an Introduction which gives a balanced account of the historical and conceptual emergence of Visual Culture Studies, the collection goes on to stage a series of engaging and detailed interviews with these thinkers. Each interview draws out the interests and commitments of the interviewees in order to interrogate critically the past, present, and future possibilities of Visual Culture Studies, the study of visual culture, and visual culture itself. The discussion concentrates on three broad areas of deliberation: - the intellectual and institutional status and potential of Visual Culture Studies; - the histories, genealogies, and archaeologies of visual culture and its study; - the diverse ways in which the experiences of vision, or the visual, can be articulated and mobilised to political, aesthetic, and ethical ends.

Marquard Smith is Reader in Visual and Material Culture at Kingston University, London, and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Visual Culture