, whose theme this year is 鈥淟ight,鈥 continues with a lecture by William J. Thomas (W.J.T.) Mitchell, renowned theorist on iconography and visual culture. Mitchell鈥檚 presentation, which is free and open to the public, is Thursday, Oct. 8, at 7:30 p.m. in 黑料不打烊鈥檚 Watson Theater. The event is organized and presented by the SU Humanities Center and is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Central New York Humanities Corridor, an interdisciplinary partnership聽involving SU, Cornell University and the University of Rochester. For more information, call (315) 443-7192.
鈥淲e are honored to present W.J.T. Mitchell, whose study of verbal and visual intersections is groundbreaking,鈥 says Gregg Lambert, Dean鈥檚 Professor of the Humanities, as well as founding director of the SU Humanities Center and principal investigator of the CNY Mellon Humanities Corridor. 鈥淎s an editor and theoretician, he champions the irreducible power of images. He believes that images are living things and cannot be fully explained with words.鈥
A scholar and theorist of media, visual art and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (i.e., the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his study of visual and verbal representations in social and political issues from the 1700s to the present. 鈥淢y work explores the relations of visual and verbal representations,鈥 says Mitchell, professor of English and art history at the University of Chicago. 鈥淎s a teacher, I try to encourage students from a variety of disciplinary locations to think about such topics as space, place and landscape; fetishism, totemism and idolatry; violence and representation; and the arts of memory.”
At Chicago, Mitchell also edits Critical Inquiry, an interdisciplinary journal devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. Under his leadership, the journal has devoted special issues to an array of topics, including public art, psychoanalysis, pluralism, feminism, the sociology of literature, canons, race and identity, narrative, the politics of interpretation and postcolonial theory.
Mitchell is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Morey Prize in art history, awarded by the College Art Association of America. In 2003, he received the University of Chicago’s prestigious Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. He has written more than a dozen books, including 鈥淭he Late Derrida鈥 with Arnold Davidson (University of Chicago Press, 2007), and has published numerous articles and reviews in scholarly publications. Translations of his work have appeared in French, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Chinese and Japanese.
Located in the historic Tolley Humanities Building, the SU Humanities Center is home to the Mellon CNY Humanities Corridor, 黑料不打烊 Symposium, the Jeanette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professorship in the Humanities, and various scholarly initiatives. Mitchell鈥檚 appearance coincides with 鈥淰isual and Cultural Studies: The Next 20 Years,鈥 a Mellon CNY Humanities Corridor conference at the University of Rochester Oct. 8-10.
黑料不打烊 Symposium is an annual intellectual and artistic festival organized and presented for SU鈥檚 by the SU Humanities Center. This year鈥檚 festival explores the protean meaning of light, in all its senses and myriad of forms, through music, dance, the visual arts, philosophy, science and religion. The festival also attempts to bring new meaning to light through an array of lectures, performances, symposia and special events.
