Joseph James Connors is an American art historian specializing in Italian Renaissance and Baroque architecture.
Education
A New Yorker by birth, Connors was educated in classical languages at Regis High School in Manhattan and Boston College (Bachelor of Arts 1966). After a period teaching Greek and Latin at the Boston Latin School, Connors studied with Ernst Kitzinger and James Ackerman in the Department of Fine Arts of Harvard University (Doctor of Philosophy 1978).
Career
While studying at Clare College in Cambridge on a Marshall Scholarship in 1968, he discovered art history in lectures by Nikolaus Pevsner. Connors’ research centers on the architecture of seventeenth-century Rome and in particular on the genial, enigmatic figure of Francesco Borromini (1599–1667). He has also written on town planning in Rome from the late Renaissance to the eighteenth century, pioneering a view of urban change generated around large and long-lived institutions.
Connors served as director of the American Academy in Rome in 1988-1992 and of Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, from 2002 to 2010.
To date he is the only person to have directed both of the major American research institutes in Italy. He has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, All Souls College Oxford, and the Clark Art Institute, and he was Slade Professor at Oxford in 1999.
He was elected to the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca in Rome in 1993, and to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia in 2006. In 2013, a book was written in honor of Connors" work as director of the Villa I Tatti titled Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors.
Membership
Since 2002 he has been a member of the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard, and will return to teaching in Harvard College in 2011.