Mitchell, W. J. Thomas (1942-....)

He 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. 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 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.

His publications include: “The Pictorial Turn,” Artforum, March 1992; “What Do Pictures Want?”, October, Summer 1996; What Do Pictures Want? (2005);
The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (1998); Picture Theory (1994); Art and the Public Sphere (1993); Landscape and Power (1992); Iconology (1987); The Language of Images (1980); On Narrative (1981); The Politics of Interpretation  (1984).

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. 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?. His recent publications include two books: Cloning Terror: The War of Images, September 11 to Abu Ghraib, and Critical Terms in Media Studies (with Mark Hansen). Seeing Through Race was published by Harvard University Press in the spring of 2012, followed closely in the spring of 2013 by Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience, co-authored with Michael Taussig and Bernard Harcourt. He is currently working on a new book, Seeing Madness: Insanity, Media, and Visual Culture.