W.J.T. Mitchell to speak on "The Future of the Image" March 2

Feb. 24, 2009 -- W.J.T. Mitchell, the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor in the departments of Art History and English at the University of Chicago, will speak on "The Future of the Image" at 6:30 p.m. Monday, March 2, as part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts' spring lecture series.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Art History & Archaeology in Arts & Sciences, the talk will be presented in the Etta Eiseman Steinberg Auditorium in Steinberg Hall, where a reception for Mitchell will begin at 6 p.m.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information, call (314) 935-4523 or visit kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu.

Mitchell is an award-winning teacher, scholar and theorist of media, art and literature. He is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology—the study of images across the media—and is known for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues.

Mitchell is editor of the interdisciplinary journal Critical Inquiry, a quarterly on critical theory in the arts and human sciences. Special issues have focused on public art, psychoanalysis, pluralism, feminism, the sociology of literature, canons, race and identity, narrative, the politics of interpretation and postcolonial theory, among other topics.

His publications include "The Pictorial Turn" (Artforum, March 1992) and the following books, among others, published by the University of Chicago Press: "What Do Pictures Want? Essays on the Lives and Loves of Images" (2005); "The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon" (1998); "Landscape and Power" (ed., 1994); and "Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology" (1986).

Mitchell is the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Morey Prize in art history given by the College Art Association of America. His essay collection titled "What Do Pictures Want?" won the Modern Language Association's prestigious James Russell Lowell Prize in 2006. In 2003, he received the University of Chicago's Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching.