Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann teaches courses on art and architecture of the sixteenth to the eighteenth century in Europe and its relations with other parts of the world. Among his seminars are classes on the literature of art, old master drawings, Central European Art, the geography of art, and global exchange in art. Professor Kaufmann has recently been advising students on dissertations on Renaissance art in Japan, on seventeenth-century poets and painters in Silesia, on architecture and culture in seventeenth-century Sweden, on architectural theory in late eighteenth-century Poland, and on Puncinello themes in the art of G. B. Tiepolo. Professor Kaufmann is vice-president of the National Committee of the History of Art, and recently served as co-chair of a session on the Idea of World Art History at the International Congress of the History of Art held in Melbourne, Australia, where he also chaired a session of art historians from China. He has recently served as a selector for the European Research Council, as well as advising various European and American universities and museum exhibition projects. In 2008 he has given lectures in Taiwan, Australia, the Netherlands, Portugal, Austria, Brazil, and Belgium on topics ranging from Arcimboldo and humor, to the geography of art, and including interpretations of the Spanish viceroyalties and art to the impact of Dutch architecture outside Europe. In 2007 Kaufmann received the F. Palacky Honorary medal for Social Sciences of the Czech Academy of Sciences, which is their highest recognition.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS: In 2004 Professor Kaufmann published three books: Toward a Geography of Art, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press; The Eloquent Artist. Essays on Art, Art Theory and Architecture, Sixteenth to Nineteenth Century. London, Pindar Press, Central European Drawings in the Crocker Museum of Art, London, Harvey Miller. In 2005 he published Painterly Enlightenment. Franz Anton Maulbertsch (1724-1796) Chapel, Hill, University of North Carolina Press, and together with Elizabeth Pilliod he edited Time and Place. The Geohistory of Art (London, Ashgate), for which he wrote the introduction. Since then he has published a booklet on East Central Europe and twenty-seven articles and reviews as well as catalogue entries on a variety of empirical and theoretical topics ranging from art and religion in the Baltic region to Japanese fumi-e. His book, Arcimboldo's Serious Jokes. Art, Humanism, Naturalism and the Origins of Still-Life Painting, is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press.