Joseph Koerner

Joseph Koerner

Department Chair
Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Art and Architecture
Senior Fellow, Society of Fellows
Joseph Koerner

Joseph Koerner teaches the history of art and architecture from the late Middle Ages to the present, with a focus on Northern Renaissance art, as well as on Dutch seventeenth-century, European Romanticism, and German and Austrian Modernism. He also teaches thematic courses on European prints and drawings, self-portraiture, monuments (with Sarah Lewis), Adam and Eve (with Stephen Greenblatt), and witches (with Felipe Pereda). He has written books on the myth of Daedalus and Icarusthe landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, word-image relations in Paul Klee self-portraiture in the Renaissance, and Protestant iconoclasm, as well as studies of Albrecht DürerHieronymus Bosch, Rembrandt, and Pieter Bruegel.  His most recent book (in press) is on art in states of siege, with chapters on Bosch, Max Beckmann, and William Kentridge.He has curated or co-curated exhibitions at Harvard Art Museums, the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruheand the Austrian National Gallery. 

Koerner wrote and presented for BBC Television the series Northern Renaissance and thefeature-length Vienna: City of Dreams. He wrote, directed, and produced The Burning Child (released 2019 by Seventh Art Releasing, now on Amazon), which explorethe dream and nightmare of homemaking in Vienna from the city's emergence as a metropolis around 1900 until Hitler's annexation of Austria in 1938  Koerner is currently a Life Trustee of the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum and a Trustee of the American Academy in Berlin. At Harvard, he serves as Senior Fellow at the Society of Fellows and Executive Committee member of the Center for Jewish Studies.j

Contact Information

485 Broadway,
Cambridge,
MA 02138
Room 520
p: 617.496.3997
Office Hours: Wednesdays, 4-5 pm, Room 520