This seminar examines the concept of "modernity" and its expression in visual form and cultural practice. We will focus on developments in visual culture beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century in order to explore a range of transformations in subjective and social experience and economic and cultural practice that scholars from across the humanities and social sciences have described within the rubric of modernity and modernism. By studying both the primary theoretical texts underpinning this concept — including Baudelaire, Marx, Freud, and Benjamin — and key secondary literature, we will attempt to define modernity and capture the nuances of its many competing definitions. We will ground this pursuit in the history of Western visual culture. Key topics will include: technological change (from photography and film to color and printing); the centrality of urban space; theories of vision; ideas about temporality, history, and the archive; emergent practices of collecting and display; travel and colonialism; and consumerism and the mass press. In what ways, we will ask, have changes in visual culture been central to the concept, experience, and origins of modernity? And how does focusing on the visual aspects of modernity help us better understand its broader social, political, economic, scientific, and technological developments?