James Elkins is E.C. Chadbourne Professor in the University of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He writes on art and non–art images; his recent books include On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction, What Happened to Art Criticism? and Master Narratives and Their Discontents. He is editing two book series for Routledge: The Art Seminar (conversations on different subjects in art theory) and Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts (short monographs on the shape of the twentieth century); currently he is organizing a seven-year series called the Stone Summer Theory Institute.

Elkins has a PhD with honors, University of Chicago, Department of Art, 1984–1989. Dissertation: “Perspective in Renaissance Art and in Modern Scholarship,” He also has a MA, University of Chicago, Department of Art, and a MFA, University of Chicago, Committee on Art and Design. He has been an associate professor in the University of Northwestern, in the University of California in Berkeley and Duke University. He has written over 80 articles in diverse publications about art and presenting lecturers in different Universities around the world.