Front Page Pictures: News Images in Modern History Instructor: Jonathan L. Dentler -- Dentler@usc.edu

• USC undergraduate students will receive a $1,500 stipend for course completion

• Non-credit course taught by a USC-Mellon Digital Humanities Ph.D. Fellow • Course meets twice a week for two-hour sessions from May 15 - June 8, 2018

What would a history look like that would take us from Albrecht Dürer’s Rhinoceros to Joe Rosenthal’s Flag-Raising on Iwo Jima? Or perhaps further, to Jonathan Bachman’s image of Ieshia Evans, a Black Lives Matter activist, about to be arrested by two riot police in 2016? In this short but intense summer seminar, we are going to delve into the history of the “news image” as a privileged vehicle for modern communication. Above all, we are going to ask about the relations between the image and the public sphere over time. We will read essential texts like Susan Sontag’s On Photography as well as important works on the press such as Jürgen Habermas’ Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, aiming for a long durée perspective on the news image, largely though not exclusively in the West. We will cap the seminar with a visit to the L.A. Times Visual Journalism Department, where we will see how photos and videos make their way from events into the news. Application Procedure: Interested undergraduates should send a CV/Resume and a cover letter explaining their academic experience and interest in the course to digitalhumanities@dornsife.usc.edu by March 30, 2018.