Born: 1942.

Education: Michigan State, BA, 1963; Johns Hopkins, PhD, 1968.

Mitchell was a professor at Ohio State University (1968–77); then at the University of Chicago, where he served as chair of the English Department (1988–91). Currently, he is Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and art history at the University of Chicago. As the editor of Critical Inquiry since 1977, he has had a decisive impact on the growth and direction of literary and cultural theory. Under his 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.

Publications

Blake's Composite Art (1977), Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology [(1986), Japanese translation, Korean-language edition, Sizirak Publishing Company, 2004], Picture Theory (1994), Landscape and Power, ed. [(1994); 2nd edition, revised and enlarged, with a new preface (2001)], The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (1998), What Do Pictures Want? Essays on the Lives and Loves of Images (2005), Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (2011), Seeing through Race (2012), Image Science: Iconography, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (2015), Metapictures: A Cloud Atlas of Images (forthcoming 2020), and Mental Traveler: A Journey through Schizophrenia (forthcoming 2020). His most influential articles include “The Pictorial Turn,” ArtForum (March 1992); “Style as Epistemology: Blake and the Movement Toward Abstraction in Romantic Art,” Studies in Romanticism (1977); “Intellectual Politics and the Malaise of the Seventies,” Salmagundi (1980; coauthored with Gerald Graff); “The Language of Images,” Critical Inquiry (1980); “Critical Inquiry and the Ideology of Pluralism,” Critical Inquiry (1982); “What is an Image?” New Literary History (1984); “The Politics of Genre: Space and Time in Lessing's Laocoon,” Representations (1984); “Wittgenstein's Imagery and What It Tells Us,” New Literary History (1988); “Space, Ideology, and Literary Representation,” Poetics Today (1989); “Influence, Autobiography, and Literary History: Rousseau’s Confessions and Wordsworth's the Prelude,” ELH (1990); “Postcolonial Culture, Postimperial Criticism,” Transition (1992); “Ekphrasis and the Other,” South Atlantic Quarterly (1992); “The Panic of the Visual: A Conversation with Edward W. Said,” Boundary 2 (1998);