W. J. T. Mitchell | |
---|---|
Born | March 24, 1942 |
Nationality | American |
Occupation(s) | Art historian, university professor |
Known for | Development of a picture theory within the field of visual culture and digital media research |
Academic background | |
Education | Michigan State University Johns Hopkins University |
Academic work | |
Institutions | University of Chicago |
Main interests | Visual culture,media theory |
William John Thomas Mitchell (born March 24,1942) is an American academic. Mitchell is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He was the editor of Critical Inquiry for 42 years,from 1978 to 2020, [1] and also contributes to the journal October.
Mitchell's monographs,Iconology (1986) and Picture Theory (1994),focus on media theory and visual culture. He draws on ideas from Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx to demonstrate that,essentially,we must consider pictures to be living things. His collection of essays What Do Pictures Want? (2005) won the Modern Language Association's prestigious James Russell Lowell Prize in 2005. [2] In a recent podcast interview,Mitchell traces his interest in visual culture to his early work on William Blake,and his then burgeoning interest in developing a science of images. [3] In that same interview,he discusses his ongoing efforts to rethink visual culture as a form of life and in light of digital media.
In 2014,Mitchell was elected to the American Philosophical Society, [4] He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017. [5]
Mitchell has been noted as a supporter of the BDS campaign by Canary Mission. [6] [7]
Iconology is a method of interpretation in cultural history and the history of the visual arts used by Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky and their followers that uncovers the cultural, social, and historical background of themes and subjects in the visual arts. Though Panofsky differentiated between iconology and iconography, the distinction is not very widely followed, "and they have never been given definitions accepted by all iconographers and iconologists". Few 21st-century authors continue to use the term "iconology" consistently, and instead use iconography to cover both areas of scholarship.
A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature's goals and methods. Although the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.
In the arts and literature, the term avant-garde identifies an experimental genre or work of art, and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time. The military metaphor of an advance guard identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus, the artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times.
Herman Northrop Frye was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.
Stephen Jay Greenblatt is an American literary historian and author. He has served as the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University since 2000. Greenblatt is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare (2015) and the general editor and a contributor to The Norton Anthology of English Literature.
Homi Kharshedji Bhabha is an Indian scholar and critical theorist. He is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is one of the most important figures in contemporary postcolonial studies, and has developed a number of the field's neologisms and key concepts, such as hybridity, mimicry, difference, and ambivalence. Such terms describe ways in which colonised people have resisted the power of the coloniser, according to Bhabha's theory. In 2012, he received the Padma Bhushan award in the field of literature and education from the Indian government. He is married to attorney and Harvard lecturer Jacqueline Bhabha, and they have three children.
Visual culture is the aspect of culture expressed in visual images. Many academic fields study this subject, including cultural studies, art history, critical theory, philosophy, media studies, Deaf Studies, and anthropology.
Bill Brown is the Karla Scherer distinguished service professor in American culture at the University of Chicago, where he teaches in the department of English language and literature, the department of visual arts, and the college. He previously held the Edward Carson Waller distinguished service professorship in humanities and the George M. Pullman professorship, and served as the chair of the University's English language and literature department from 2006-2008. After a brief term as the deputy dean for academic and research initiatives in the division of the humanities, Brown was recruited to be the new deputy provost for the arts in 2014. As deputy provost, Brown oversees the programming and future of UChicago Arts, serves on the arts steering committee, and chairs the UChicago art institutions subcommittee. He also serves on a number of other committees across campus - including the executive committee of the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture - and is the principal investigator for the object cultures project at The Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. He has co-edited the University of Chicago's peer-reviewed literary journal, Critical Inquiry, since 1993.
Critical Inquiry is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal in the humanities published by the University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Department of English Language and Literature. While the topics and historical periods it covers are diverse, the journal is known as a long-standing, highly regarded critical theory driven venue for interpretive scholarship, especially but not exclusively in literature and textual criticism. It was established in 1974 by Wayne Booth, Arthur Heiserman, and Sheldon Sacks. From 1978 to 2020, the journal was edited by W. J. T. Mitchell. Since June 2020 it is co-edited by Bill Brown and Frances Ferguson.
Depiction is reference conveyed through pictures. A picture refers to its object through a non-linguistic two-dimensional scheme, and is distinct from writing or notation. A depictive two-dimensional scheme is called a picture plane and may be constructed according to descriptive geometry, where they are usually divided between projections and perspectives.
Representation is the use of signs that stand in for and take the place of something else. It is through representation that people organize the world and reality through the act of naming its elements. Signs are arranged in order to form semantic constructions and express relations.
Art history is, briefly, the history of art—or the study of a specific type of objects created in the past.
Romantic Circles is an academic peer-reviewed website dedicated to the study of Romantic literature and culture, featuring online editions of many texts of the Romantic era, as well as essays devoted to Romantic literature, culture, and theory.
Joseph Carroll is a scholar in the field of literature and evolution. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley and is now Curators’ Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.
Jay Clayton is an American literary critic who is known for his work on the relationship between nineteenth-century culture and postmodernism. He has published influential works on Romanticism and the novel, Neo-Victorian literature, steampunk, hypertext fiction, online games, contemporary American fiction, technology in literature, and genetics in literature and film. He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.
Joseph Leo Koerner is an American art historian and filmmaker. He is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Art and Architecture and Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Since 2008 he has also been Senior Fellow at the Harvard's Society of Fellows.
Mary Diana Lee Sheriff was an American art historian, and W.R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Art History at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who specialized in eighteenth-century French art, decorative arts, gender studies, and material culture.
The Gordon J. Laing Award is conferred annually, by the University of Chicago's Board of University Publications, on the faculty author, editor, or translator whose book has brought the greatest distinction to the list of the University of Chicago Press. The first award was given in 1963 and the most recent award was given on April 23, 2024, to Margareta Ingrid Christian, Asst. Professor, Department of Germanic Studies and the College at the University of Chicago.
David Morgan is Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, with an additional appointment in Duke's Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies. Morgan served as the Chair in the Department of Religious Studies in Trinity College of Duke University from 2013 to 2016. He is the author of numerous books, including The Forge of Vision (2015), The Embodied Eye (2012), and The Sacred Gaze (2005).
Barbara Baert is a Belgian art historian, and professor of art history at KU Leuven. In 2016 Baert earned the prestigious Francquiprijs, which is yearly awarded by the Francqui-Stichting to a scientist in human, exact and biological-medical sciences.