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. His teaching includes seminars and classes on the literature of art, old master drawings, Central European Art, the art of Latin America, the geography of art, global exchange in art, the possibilities of world art history, and art, science, and magic. Professor Kaufmann has recently advised students who have written or are writing dissertations on Jesuit 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, on Puncinello themes in the art of G. B. Tiepolo, on occult themes in the German Renaissance, and on the architect and theorist Wenzel Dietterlin.

In December 2010 Professor Kaufmann was awarded the degree of Doctor philosophiae honoris causa by the Technische Universität, Dresden. The diploma presented to him at a ceremony held in Dresden in May 2011 cited the quality of his scholarship, especially on Central Europe, its application as a basis in the effort to establish a more global history of art, and his services for international collaboration and mutual understanding among nations. At the ceremony Professor Kaufmann lectured on Natural History and Art in Dresden.

During the summer of 2010 Professor Kaufmann presented lectures on the possibilities of world art history at a symposium on Visual Culture and National Identity held at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and a symposium “Sur le terrain: Geographies of Art” Terra Foundation, Paris. He also spoke on the geography of art at the University of San Marino. During the academic year 2010- 2011 he co-organized and chaired a session on “Voices from Around the World” for the National Committee of the History of Art and the International Committee of the College Art Association at CAA’s Annual Meeting in New York; he was also invited by CAA to chair an extraordinary centennial session on globalization at the Annual Meeting. The Historians of Netherlandish Art invited him to cochair and organize a session on the global aspects of Netherlandish art that was held at the Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America held in Montreal. He gave the summary lecture at a symposium in Prague related to the exhibition devoted to Hans von Aachen that he had helped organize.

Other recent activities include his participation in the fellowship committee of the European Research Council, and as a reader for the Fellowship Committee of the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. He has worked to revise the structure of the National Committee of the History of Art, of which he is vice-president. He wrote the basic script and advised on a film on Arcimboldo made by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., to accompany their exhibition on the artist. The film, translated into Italian, was also shown at the Palazzo Reale, Milan, at an exhibition devoted to Arcimboldo held there. It has won a prize for documentaries.

In 2010 and 2011 Professor Kaufmann has published the following chapters in books: “Interpreting Cultural Transfer and the Consequences of Markets and Exchange: Reconsidering Fumi-e,” in Artistic and Cultural Exchanges between Europe and Asia, 1400-1900. Rethinking Markets, Workshops and Collections, ed. Michael North, Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington, Vermont, Ashgate, 2010, pp. 135-161; (with Michael North) “Introduction---Artistic and Cultural Exchanges between Europe Asia, 1400-1900: Rethinking Markets, Workshops and Collections,” ibid., pp. 1-8;“The Drawings,” in Hans von Aachen. Court Artist in Europe, ed. Thomas Fusenig in collaboration with Alice Taatgen and Heinrich Becker, (exhibition catalogue Aachen, Prague, and Vienna) Berlin and Munich, 2010, pp. 33-41, along with fifteen entries on drawings, prints, and paintings; the article “Addenda to Christoph Gertner,” Studia Rudolphina, x, 2010, pp. 124-130; interventions in Art and Globalization (The Stone Art Theory Institutes i) ed. James Elkins, Zhivka Valiavicharska, and Alice Kim, University Park, PA., Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010, pp. 13 and n. 2, 27 and n. 12, 28, 29 and n. 15, 31, 37 and n. 1, 38 and nn. 3-4, 39 and n. 5, 41-42 and nn. 12-14, 44, 47, 48, 49 and n. 18, 56, 57 and n. 13, 59-60 and n. 20, 92, 101, 102 and n. 7, 103104 and n. 8, 117, 124-125; and a review of Gary Cohen and Franz A. J. Szabo, Embodying Power, New York and Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2008, Austrian History Yearbook, xli, April 2010, pp. 265-267.

His most recent book is Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2009 (released 2010).