James Elkins grew up in Ithaca, New York. He received his PhD in Art History in1989 from the University of Chicago, where he has since taught in the Department of Visual and Critical Studies and the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His writing focuses on the history and theory of images in art, science, and nature. He is married to Margaret MacNamidhe, an art historian specializing in Delacroix. According to his website, www.jameselkins.com, his interests include "freshwater microscopy (with a Zeiss phase contrast microscope), optics (he owns an ophthalmologist's slit-lamp microscope), stereo photography (with a Realist camera), playing piano, and winter ocean diving." Scientific American calls How to Use Your Eyes (NY: Routledge 2000) "visually stunning and mentally stimulating."

Additional publications include:

• The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1994).
• The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (Simon and Schuster, 1996).
• Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing (Penn State Press, 1997). Paperback edition, with new preface (New York: Routledge, 2000).
• On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998).
  
• Why are Our Pictures Puzzles? On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity (New York: Routledge, 1999).
• The Domain of Images, On the Historical Study of Visual Artifacts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1999).
• Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999).
  
  

James Elkins is Professor of Art History & Criticism, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

His keynote address was entitled, "Visual Literacy: Who Has It?" and took place on Saturday, April 5th at 6:00 p.m. in the Gould Auditorium in Marriott Library.

For more information about James Elkins, please visit his web page.

Here is the Elkins bio.

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