Joseph Koerner is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Art and Architecture, Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and, since 2008, Senior Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He has organized teaching exhibitions at Harvard on Early Netherlandish Painting, German Renaissance Art, Pieter Bruegel and Netherlandish prints 1550-1675. At the Austrian National Gallery in 1997, he curated a retrospective of the work of his father, the Viennese-born American painter Henry Koerner. In 2002, he collaborated with Bruno Latour on the exhibition Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. His books include Die Suche nach dem Labyrinth: Der Mythos von Daedalus und Ikarus, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, The Reformation of the Image, Dürer’s Hands, and Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life. Koerner wrote and presented the three-part series Northern Renaissance for BBC Television, as well as the feature-length documentary Vienna: City of Dreams, which premiered on the BBC in December 2007. He wrote, directed, and produced the film The Burning Child (2018) for cinema release.
Koerner was awarded the Jan Mitchell Prize for the History of Art in 1992 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship 2006-7. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. In 2009 he was awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award and has delivered the Slade Lectures both at Cambridge University (2003) and at Oxford University (2013), as well as the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery in Washington (2008), Tanner Lectures at Cambridge University (2012), Gombrich Lectures at the Warburg Institute (2016), and Avenali Lectures in the Humanities at Berkeley (2018). He received the 2020 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art from the College Art Association.
Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Vienna, Austria, Koerner studied at Yale University and Cambridge University, in addition to a year studying philosophy and German literature at Heidelberg University. He received his PhD in art history at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1988. He currently serves as Chair of the Department History of Art and Architecture at Harvard.
