Faculty

Asst. Prof. Tina Post became intrigued with how the gesture of expressionlessness operated in the 20th-century Black performances across literature, visual and performance art, film, theater, dance, the boxing ring and everyday life. For her original insights, she recently received the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Best Book Prize for her first book, “Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression” (2023). The ASAP Prize recognizes the book that has made the most significant contribution to the study of the arts of the present.

Post contends that deadpan—dead is for inanimate, and pan is slang for face—is an investigation of the aesthetic affects at work at the intersection of Blackness and embodied expression.

“This book motivated by questions about the phenomenon I see,” said Post, assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and the College at UChicago. “I had not read satisfying explorations about expressionlessness and its intersection with Blackness.”

Prof. W. J. T. Mitchell may be the only living iconologist on the planet. He draws on ideas from ancient and modern mythology that treat pictures as living things. As a historian of cultural images, Mitchell studies the relationship between words and images, cultivating visual and verbal literacy.

For his immense scholarly work in iconology and his 42 years as the editor of UChicago’s well-known humanities journal, Critical Inquiry, Mitchell will receive the Modern Language Association’s Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement on Jan. 5, 2024, in Philadelphia. It is also a fitting finish to his teaching career at UChicago, which officially ends in January 2024. The Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award is given every three years. Previous winners include well-known professors Maynard Mack at Yale University; J. Hillis Miller at University of California, Irvine; Susan Gubar at Indiana University; and René Girard at Stanford University.