The course examines the emergence of modern visual culture between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 20th century. It tracks the development of new technologies and conditions of viewing?from the panorama to photography to early cinema?and situates those developments in relation to larger social, intellectual, and cultural shifts in our conceptions of subjectivity, collectivity, and the mechanics of optical perception. The visual material at the center of our discussions will include nineteenth- and twentieth-century photographs, as well as paintings, prints, film, and other forms of visual entertainment and ephemera.