Joseph H. Larnerd is a writer and material culturist whose work attends to the social histories of the decorative arts, especially in the United States. He lives and works in Philadelphia where he is an assistant professor of design history at Drexel University.
Multiple institutions have supported his research with fellowships or grants. They include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Winterthur Museum, the Huntington Library, the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Corning Museum of Glass, and the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design.
Larnerd earned his PhD in art history from Stanford University in 2019. Since arriving at Drexel that year, he has received a Provost Award for Pedagogical Innovation (2024) and an Allen Rothwarf Award for Teaching Excellence (2022). He is a first-generation college graduate.
PhD, Stanford University, Art History, 2019 ; MA, Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, University of Delaware, 2013 ; MA, Art History, Temple University, 2011 ; BA, History, Temple University, 2006
PUBLICATIONS
Undercut: Cut Glass in Working-Class Life during the Long Gilded Age (forthcoming, University of Delaware Press, Material Culture Perspectives Series)
"A Leg Lamp Story" (forthcoming, Journal of Design History)
“The McKinley Bowl’s Service and Disservice, 1898-1901,” American Art 37, no. 2 (2023): 108-125
The Museum of Where We Are [exhibition catalog], ed. Joseph H. Larnerd (Philadelphia: The Drexel Collection, 2022)
“The Worker in the Window: Class, Cut Glass, and the Spectacle of Work, 1910,” The Journal of Modern Craft 13, no. 2 (2020): 119-136
“Scorpion in a Bottle,” in The Art of Description: Writings on the Cantor Collection (Stanford: Cantor Arts Center, 2014), 78-83
My research and teaching attend to the social histories of design and material culture from the late-eighteenth century to the present, especially in the United States. Much of my work considers how the decorative arts as well as images of their making and use have intervened in popular understandings and enactments of social class, privilege, and mobility. I am especially invested in exploring the roles of such artifacts in the lives and labors of the working classes, whether as representations, products of their efforts, or possessions. My current book project, Undercut: Cut Glass in Working-Class Life during the Gilded Age, offers one such history of cut glass, domestic glassware incised with geometric patterns and very popular around the turn of the 20th century. Additional interests connecting my writing and teaching include material culture theory and method, the relationships between the decorative arts and dissent, and the role of ekphrasis in art historical and material culture writing.