Mitchell, W. J. T. 1942-

William John Thomas Mitchell (born March 24, 1942) is an American scholar. Mitchell is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. His research is focused on media theory, iconology, and the relations between different art forms, such as the verbal representation of visual art. He was the editor of Critical Inquiry for 42 years, from 1978 to 2020, and also contributed to numerous other journals, including the London Review of Books, Public Culture, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Art forum, and New Literary History. He is the author or editor of more than twenty books and the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including lifetime achievement awardsfor literary criticism from the Modern Language Association of America and for art history from the College Art Association. The University of Chicago Press has awarded him its Gordon E. Laing Prize for the best book by a Chicago author twice: for ''Picture Theory'' (1995) and ''What Do Pictures Want?'' (2005). 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, and the long history of philosophical reflections on images from Plato to Michel Foucault, exploring the uncanny resemblance between images and life-forms. His collection of essays What Do Pictures Want? (2005) won the Modern Language Association's prestigious James Russell Lowell Prize in 2005. 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 that would breach the boundaries between science and the humanities. In that same interview, he discusses his ongoing efforts to rethink verbal and visual image forms in the age of social media and artificial intelligence. In 2014, Mitchell was elected to the American Philosophical Society, He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017. He is a member of the British Academy, was awarded a Berlin Prize Fellowship by the American Academy in Berlin, and has a resident fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. Mitchell has been noted as a supporter of the BDS campaign by Canary Mission. Mitchell has written on both Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers and has given invited lectures at Hebrew University, Bar-Ilan University, Tel Aviv University, the Bezalel Academy of Art, Birzeit University, the American University of Beirut, and the International Academy of Art Palestine.