Academic brochures once foregrounded ideas. Today, they foreground faces. When did scholarship become a visual spectacle—and what does it say about power, visibility, and expertise in academia? When Ideas Need Faces: The Rise of Academic Visual Spectacle This blog emerges from an unease I have been carrying for a while—one that crystallised only recently. It is about how the culture of digital visual spectacle has quietly but firmly entered academic spaces, especially in the post-pandemic world. Most of us are familiar with academic brochures announcing seminars, conferences, invited lectures, and workshops. There was a time—not too long ago—when these brochures focused on the idea: the theme of the event, the names of invited scholars, their institutional affiliations, and the titles of their talks. That was the grammar of academic publicity. But today, there is a new, almost unquestioned addition to this space of supposed intellectual deliberation: the photograph of the speaker. ...