The Academy in a State of Siege: Pictures of an Institution

Co-sponsored by the NYU Department of English and the NYU Institute of Fine Arts. 

Since there is no doubt that the academy is in a state of siege at the present time, it seems like a good moment to reflect on the persons, places, and things we call “academies” and their long struggle with the forces that both threaten and define their existence. This will be a slide lecture on images and narratives of academia from the myth of Akademos, to Plato’s Academy,  the Florentine Academy of Drawing, the British Royal Academy, and Pierre Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus. 

Mitchell will focus on the role of the visual arts in the academy (including his own), and conclude with contemporary attempts to re-imagine the academy as itself a work of art.

W. J. T. Mitchell is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor in English Language and Literature, Art History, and the College at the University of Chicago. He was the longtime editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Morey Prize in art history given by the College Art Association of America. Mitchell has published many volumes including, The Language of Images (1980), On Narrative (1981), The Politics of Interpretation (1983), Against Theory (1985), Art and the Public Sphere (1993), What Do Pictures Want? (2005), Seeing Through Race (2012), among many other works.