Nobody Cares About Art. Everybody Cares About Martin Luther King.

w/ Jeff Giering and W. J. T. Mitchell

January 20th, 7pm

In observance of MLK and Inauguration Day, Shanghai Seminary will close its inaugural show with gender abolitionist Jeff Giering's live commentary on several aspects of the show. Professor W. J. T. Mitchell is invited to advise this reception and join the following conversation.

Jeff Giering is a White, nonbinary writer from Southern Connecticut who relocated to Chicago in late 2024.

W. J. T. Mitchell is a Professor Emeritus in English, Art History, and Cinema Studies at the University of Chicago, and the Senior Editor of Critical Inquiry. He is known for his many books on the theory of images across the media, including Iconology (1986), Picture Theory (1994), What Do Pictures Want? (2005), and Image Science (2012). Other major publications include The Last Dinosaur Book (1998), Cloning Terror: The War of Images 9-11 to the Present (2011), and Seeing through Race (2012). Books about his work include The Pictorial Turn, ed. Neal Curtis (2010) and W. J. T. Mitchell’s Image Theory, ed. Kresimir Purgar (2016). He is best known for his foundational work in the field of visual culture, with special emphasis on political spectacle, surveillance, and iconic historical moments like September 11, 2002, January 6, 2021, and October 7, 2023. His forty year editorship at Critical Inquiry was marked by special issues on race, gender and sexuality, comics and media, the politics of interpretation, and historic debates about the stakes of critical theory in the humanities and social sciences. His latest book is Mental Traveler: A Father, a Son, and a Journey through Schizophrenia (2020), and he is currently finishing a book entitled Seeing Through Madness: Essays in Crazy Times. In 2024, he received the College Art Association’s Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art, and the Modern Language Association’s Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement.