On Leave: 2008-2009
Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor
Department of English
Department of Art History
Editor, Critical Inquiry

Office: Wieboldt 203
Phone: (773) 702-8475
wjtm@uchicago.edu

I teach in both the English and the Art History departments and edit the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. I work particularly on the history and theories of media, visual art, and literature, from the eighteenth century to the present.  My work explores the relations of visual and verbal representations in the culture and iconology (the study of images across the media).  In addition to publications resulting from my own research, under my 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.  As a teacher I try to encourage students from a variety of disciplinary locations to think about such topics as: "Space, Place, and Landscape," "Fetishism, Totemism, Idolatry," "The Eye and the Gaze," "Violence and Representation," and "The Arts of Memory." A few years ago I developed what has proven as especially successful course in "Theories of Media."  In 2003, I received the University of Chicago's Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching.

>> W. J. T. Mitchell's Homepage

Graduate: Theories of Media; Totemism, Fetishism, Idolatry; Visual Culture; Space, Place, and Landscape; Violence and Representation; The Eye and the Gaze; Vital Signs; The Arts of Memory; Contemporary Political Documentary.

Undergraduate: Visual Culture; Media Aesthetics; Theories of Media.

Cloning Terror: The War of Images from September 11 to Abu Ghraib

Selected Publications:
What Do Pictures Want? Essays on the Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, 2005). The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (Chicago, 1998). Landscape and Power, ed. (Chicago, 1994); 2nd edition, revised and enlarged, with a new preface, 2001. Picture Theory (Chicago, 1994). "The Pictorial Turn," ArtForum (March 1992, pp. 89ff). See www.artforum.com. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, 1986). Japanese translation. Korean-language edition, Sizirak Publishing Company, forthcoming 2004. Blake's Composite Art (Princeton, 1977).

Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, 1968.  Teaching at Chicago since 1977.