W.J.T. Mitchell

Biography

W. J. T. Mitchell is editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues. Under his editorship,  Critical Inquiry has published special issues on public art, psychoanalysis, pluralism, feminism, the sociology of literature, canons, race and identity, narrative, the politics of interpretation, postcolonial theory, and many other topics. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Morey Prize in art history given by the College Art Association of America. In 2003, he received the University of Chicago’s prestigious Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching.

During his editorship, Critical Inquiry has published issues on canon-formation, gender, race and writing, public art, politics and poetic value, metaphor, psychoanalysis, identity politics, pluralism, new directions in art history, questions of evidence, and many other special topics.

Professor Mitchell has twice served as a Professor at the School of Criticism and Theory (Northwestern, 1983; Dartmouth, 1990), and he has lectured at universities and art museums throughout the United States, as well as in Europe and the Far East.  Recent special teaching assignments include a Mellon Faculty Seminar at Tulane University, a seminar on Romanticism at Beijing Foreign Studies University in China, an NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers at the University of Chicago, a post as Canterbury Visiting Fellow at Canterbury University, New Zealand, a visiting professorship at the Institute for Art History, Aarhus, Denmark, and two visiting professorships at the Institute for Fine Arts and English Department at New York University in 1998 and 2000. The South African Council for Scientific Development sponsored his lectures in Capetown, Durban, and Johannesburg in the summer of 1997, and Duke University invited him to give the Benenson Lectures in Art History in the spring of 2000. In the spring of 2002 he was awarded the Berlin Prize Fellowship to the American Academy in Berlin, and in the fall of 2002 he delivered the Alfonso Reyes Lectures in Mexico City. Other recent lectures include the W. E. B. Du Bois lectures at Harvard, and the Patten Lectures at Indiana University. He was a research fellow at the Clark Institute for Art History in the fall of 2008, and received the MLA’s 2006 James Russell Lowell Prize in Language and Literature for "What Do Pictures Want?".

Publications

Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics

University of Chicago Press
,
2015

Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience

University of Chicago Press
,
2013

Cloning Terror: the War of Images 9/11 to the Present

University of Chicago Press
,
2011

What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images

University of Chicago Press
,
2006

Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation

University of Chicago Press
,
2005

Profiles

Andrei Pop
Andrei Pop
Modern Art and Aesthetics
Department Chair
CWAC 162 | Tuesdays 1-2pm or by appointment.
773.702.0278
Niall Atkinson
Niall Atkinson
Medieval and Renaissance Architecture and Urban History
CWAC 260
773.702.0270
Wei-Cheng Lin
Wei-Cheng Lin
Chinese Art and Architecture
Architectural Studies Advisor
CWAC 268 | Office Hours: Wednesdays 9-10am and 12-1pm
773.702.0268
2006-07
Iowa State University
Assistant Professor, East Asian Art and Architecture
Potters Wheel
Richard Neer
Ancient Greek Art and Architecture
CWAC 259
773.702.5890
Megan Sullivan
Megan Sullivan
Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art
CWAC 272
773.702.5126