William John Thomas Mitchell (born March 24, 1942) is an American academic.
Mitchell is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago.
He draws on ideas from Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx to demonstrate that, essentially, we must consider pictures to be living things.
(2005) won the Modern Language Association's prestigious James Russell Lowell Prize in 2005.
[3] In that same interview, he discusses his ongoing efforts to rethink visual culture as a form of life and in light of digital media.