Joseph Koerner

Joseph Koerner

Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Victor S. Thomas Professor of History of Art & Architecture, Department of History of Art & Architecture
Koerner

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and raised there and in Vienna, Austria, Joseph Leo Koerner studied English and German literature at Yale University (BA 1980), Cambridge University (MA 1982), and University of Heidelberg (1982-3). He received his Ph.D. in art history at the University of California at Berkeley. After three years at the Society of Fellows (1986-9), he joined the Harvard faculty, where he was Professor of History of Art and Architeccture until 1999. During 1999-2002 he was Professor of Modern Art history at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. In 2000 he moved to London where he was Professor at University College London (until 2004) and the Courtauld Institute of Art (until 2007).  He returned to Harvard in 2008 as the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History of Art and Architecture.

Currently Interim Chair of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Koerner teaches courses on the history of art and architecture from the late Middle Ages to the present day, with an emphasis on Northern Renaissance art. He has also taught and written on Dutch seventeenth-century art, German and English Romanticism, and Viennese Modernism in literature, art, and architecture. He has published books on the myth of Daedalus and Icarus (1983), Caspar David Friedrich (Yale 1990), word-image relations in Paul Klee (1991), self-portraiture in German Renaissance art (1993), art and iconoclasm during the German Reformation (Chicago 2004), Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel (Princeton 2016), and Albrecht Dürer (2006 and 2022).  He is completing a book on art in states of siege, focused on Bosch, Max Beckmann, and William Kentridge (forthcoming Princeton University Press). He has curated or co-curated exhibitions at Harvard Art Museums, Chatham University, and the Austrian National Gallery. With Bruno Latour he co-curated three exhibitions at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe.

Koerner wrote and presented the three-part series Northern Renaissance for BBC Television, as well as the feature-length documentary Vienna: City of Dreams, also for the BBC. He wrote, directed, and produced the documentary film The Burning Child (released 2019 by Seventh Art Releasing), which explored, through interviews and visual montage, the 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. Funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award (2009), the film was an official selection at the Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival and J-Film Pittsburgh and has been screened at museums and universities throughout the USA and in Austria. The film will be available on iTunes and Amazon Prime later this year. In the 1990s Koerner was a frequent reviewer for The New Republic and has subsequently written for the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Granta. In 2020, his non-fiction “Maly Trostinets” (a coda to The Burning Child) was selected as “Best American Essay” and re-published by Houghton-Mifflin. His most recent publications include the article, with Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg “Iconoclash in Northern Italy circa 1500” (in Critical Inquiry 2021) and the book Dürer’s Mobility (London: National Gallery of Art, 2022). He serves on the Board of the American Academy in Berlin.

 

Contact Information

Broadway 485
p: (617) 496-3997