The academic context for the Centre is a relatively recent scholarly endeavour that has developed during this renascent period for religion. It draws upon and together the theories and agenda of art, art history, material culture, visual culture, and religion. However, it is not just a hybridisation of existing inter-disciplines but also, more significantly, a descriptive, a critical, and an interpretative approach to a diverse and complex body of material with a view to establishing a coherent whole.
 

The visual culture of religion is a discipline in the making, in that it seeks to define a distinctive conceptual framework, methodological analysis, theoretical techniques, empirical data, and systematic and synoptic views of its subject(s). To these ends, the Centre aims to advance scholarship at the intersection of visuality, culture, and religion — fields that (in the west) previously have been seen as antagonistic and dealt with separately. The triangulation of these fields not only maps out a landscape of material and methods that bi-lateral disciplines (crossing the visual with the cultural, and the cultural with the religious) have either overlooked or neglected, but also demonstrates how each field mediates and informs the other two.
 

Consonant with the disciplines of material culture and visual culture, the Centre affirms that representations are manifestations of (religious) cultural history, and embody and convey meaning. (Visual culture interprets and influences religious culture and vice versa.) The Centre, thereby, refutes the assumption that ‘religion is … only apprehended through language’ (Mizruchi, 2001).
 

The Centre will reflect new developments in Art History. First, programs in art history throughout North America and the UK are expanding their foci to include not simply the production of images, but the reception of images as well. Traditional art history has told the story behind the artwork (what is its style and medium, who made it, who paid for it, where was it made and when), but has tended to leave the study at that. The emphasis within the Centre will be to ask about who looks at the images, how they look, and what kinds of meanings these images have for the viewers, above and beyond what the artist may have intended. Visual culture is interested in, among other things, the ongoing life of images. “Art” is created, and continues to exist, within specific cultures.

Furthermore, within art history there is a movement away from the elitism often implied in equating “art” with “fine and/or high art.” Since much of what goes under the name art in the West has been supported by and created for the upper class, visual culture has sought to reassess the role of images in the lives of people from various classes. This means the split between high and low art cannot be maintained, and even definitions of art itself have shifted. As Mieke Bal suggested of visual culture, it ‘analyses the rejects of the official disciplines.’ These very rejects may be ignored by scholarship, but they have great value in living cultures. In these respects, the Centre is committed to an inclusive cross-cultural and pan-religious study, wherein culture (with both a capital and a lower-case ‘c’) is regarded as pluralistic, and religion (likewise) diverse — comprising not only mainstream and orthodox religious movements but also heterodox and marginal subsets.
 

The varieties of visuality dealt with by the Centre include static and kinetic or performative, fixed and temporal representations, along with traditional and new media, embodied in, among other categories of creativity: fine art; craft; design; commercial products; architecture and buildings, the furnishings and the accoutrements of liturgy, ritual, and worship; film and television; and digital media. Accordingly, the Centre will reflect rapidly growing interests in new fields of study such as visual anthropology, cultural studies, film studies, and media studies. The disciplines of art history and religious studies have also been changed in recent years by the increasing prominence of these new areas of study. Art history and religious studies have both been infused with the social sciences, and challenged to re-evaluate themselves in relation to neighbouring social structures (in other words, religion cannot be understood apart from culture) and neighbouring media (that is to say, contemporary art is no longer focused on painting and sculpture, but quickly spills over into film, video, and television, as well as public performances outside the space of the institution of the museum).

The understanding here is that religion is always mediated. It always works within and through particular material objects and performances in space and time. Thus, our Centre will focus on many of the various visual mediations of religion. This includes architecture; religious tracts; graphic, garden, and urban design; mass-produced images of popular piety; video and film; as well as the more traditional Western artistic media of painting and sculpture.
 

Recognising that religions conduct their activities through a combination of visual, textual, oral, and musical modes of expression, the Centre also examines what might called transitional or syncretic visual forms which cross or combine with other modes (For example, in the case of Islamic calligraphy, the visual and the textual.)
 

There are other distinctive features of and opportunities for research into the visual culture of religion, which the Centre promotes. Religion is concerned with the ontological, experiential, transcendental aspects of life (that is, being and meaning, and death and the afterlife). Consequently, the visual culture of religion has a far broader base of interests than the disciplines of visual culture and material culture, one that incorporates the imaginative and immaterial realms, including the visual expression of the sacred and numinous; visions, prophecies, and dreams; preternatural agencies such as divinities, angels, ghosts, and spirits; near death experience; and post-mortem existence.
 

Religion is also concerned with origins, cosmology, and eschatology. The representation of apocalyptic and eschatological themes and a vision of futurity conjoin the visual culture of religion and the visual culture of science and science fiction. This relationship is both recognised and exploited by popular culture in films and television, but hitherto largely ignored by academia, and provides a quadrilateral relationship of visuality, religion, science, and culture.
 

The visual culture of religion and science share at least one further potential subject of collaboration — the subjective domain of religious experience (the site of prayer, meditation, the imagination, and memory). While religious scholars, psychologists, and psychiatrists have conducted extensive research in this area, art historians have to date rarely addressed the formal, iconographic, and perceptual character of inner religious visualization.
 

Religion, furthermore, is about religious people. Since most of the religious people in the history of the world have been illiterate and without access to books, and since sacred texts have been read primarily by the upper class, a focus on visual images and their attendant practices allows researchers to investigate how religious people actually behave. Visual culture begins with the practices of religion and investigates, for example, the ways images: are believed to mediate between the divine and human worlds; offer exemplary models for human behaviour; provide a focal point for a community of practitioners; function to reorganize space and time for ritualised practices; and maintain mythic structures.

The Centre also examine how religious people are perceived, perceive of themselves and of others. The visual documentation of religious communities (in photographs and paintings), artefacts of cultic commemoration (such as memorials and monuments), and images used in proselytising and missionary work, alone, represents a vast resource by which to understand how religionists construct and mediate their identity, visual memory, and attitudes to those outside the faith.
 

Research in the visual culture of religion takes place at a macro and a micro level. At the macro level, inter-religious studies examine the salient correspondences and divergences between the visual cultures of the five major religions. There are, in addition, intra-religious studies, which investigate similarities and differences in visual cultures among movements and groups comprising a single religion. At a micro level, scholars examine individual movements or groups, or specific aspects of several related movements or groups. Likewise, the context of study is, at one extreme, large scale, taking in a global perspective over a broad span of history while, at another extreme, small scale, confined to a single country and a limited timeframe. The Centre will embrace all these perspectives.

• architecture
• church furnishings, decorations and elaborations
• fine art
• film and television
• illustrated children's literature
• popular prints, photographs, posters, and tracts
• religious ephemera and commercial 'kitsch'

• angels, ghosts, and spirits
• iconographic frameworks outside the traditional pool of Christian imagery
• iconography and iconology of visions and dreams
• imagery of sermons, hymns, other literary artefacts
• near-death experiences, and preternatural manifestations such as narratives describing encounters with God and Christ
• religious art
• religious and theological exegeses of post-sixteenth-century
• revisionist theories and histories of abstract art
• theologies of art and aesthetics
• theories of visual and religious discourse
• sociology of art and religion
• Spiritualist imagery and psychic automatism 
• working-class religious imagery