Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago

is Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He served as Chair of the English Department from 1988 to 1991, and has been the editor of "Critical Inquiry" since 1978. His work is primarily focused on the interplay of vision and language in art, literature, and media, and the subjects of his articles range from general problems in the theory of representation to specific issues in cultural politics and political culture. Professor Mitchell has received numerous fellowships and awards (from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Philosophical Society, among others). Translations of his writings have appeared in French, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Chinese, and Japanese. His books include Blake's Composite Art (Princeton, 1977), Iconology (Chicago, 1986), Picture Theory (Chicago, 1994), The Last Dinosaur Book (Chicago, 1998), and What Do Pictures Want? (Chicago, 2005), Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago, 2011). He has edited six collections of essays, all published by University of Chicago Press: The Language of Images (1980), On Narrative (1981), The Politics of Interpretation (1983), Against Theory (1985), Art and the Public Sphere (1993), and Landscape and Power (1994).