Prior to coming to Princeton, Michael Koortbojian was the Nancy H. and Robert E. Hall Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins, a position that followed over a decade of teaching at the University of Toronto.

Koortbojian has been a Fellow of the Warburg Institute in London, Kings' College Cambridge, and the American Academy in Rome, and he has been awarded research grants by the Kress Foundation, the British Academy, the Mellon Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He is currently a member of the Executive Committee of Princeton's Program in Hellenic Studies, as well as a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington. In the past he has served as a member of the Editorial Board of the Art Bulletin, and as a consultant for the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation, The Kress Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council of Canada.

His scholarship has focused, not only on various aspects of Roman art, but on its study by Renaissance antiquarians. Among the former have been investigations of the relationships between texts and images, and the role of historical imagery as an aspect of ideology; among the latter, the rise of the systematic study of the Classical past, and, in particular, the early collecting of ancient inscriptions as an aspect of a new conception of historical method. His book Myth, Meaning, and Memory on Roman Sarcophagi, appeared in 1995 from the University of California Press; another book, tentatively entitled Making Men Gods, devoted to problems surrounding the institution of the divinization of the Roman emperor, will be published next year by the Cambridge University Press.

Recent Publications:

“Renaissance Spolia and Renaissance Antiquity (One Neighborhood, Three Cases),” in Reuse Value – Twelve Critical Views on Spolia and Appropriation from Constantine to Sherrie Levine, edd. D. Kinney and R. Brilliant (Ashgate, 2011), 149-65. "Crossing the Pomerium. The Armed Ruler at Rome", in The Emperor and Rome, edd. B. C. Ewald and C. Norena (Cambridge 2010), 247-74. "The Double Identity of Roman Portrait Statues", in Roman Dress and the Fabrics of Roman Culture, edd. J. Edmondson and A. Keith (Toronto 2008), 71-93. Forthcoming: “The Repertory of Ritual and the Representation of Sacrifice,” in Materiality and visibility of rituals in the ancient world, ed. I. Mylonopoulos (Stuttgart, 2013). “Roman Sarcophagi,” in The Blackwell Companion to Roman Art, ed. B. Borg (Oxford, 2013). “Standardization and Transformation. Some Observations on the Sarcophagus Trade and Sarcophagus Production,” in Flesheaters, ed. C. Hallett (Berlin, 2012/13?). “The Mythology of Everyday Life,” in Iconographie funéraire romaine et société : corpus antique, approches nouvelles? Ed., M. Galinier (PUF, 2013).