WJT Mitchell

WJT Mitchell is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of English Language and Literature and Art History, as well as the editor of Critical Inquiry. 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. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the College Art Association’s Teaching Award in Art History, and the University of Chicago’s Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. Recently, he was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society. His book What Do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images (University of Chicago Press, 2005) won the 2006 Gordon J. Laing Prize from the University of Chicago Press. His recent publications include Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and Seeing Through Race (Harvard University Press, 2012).