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
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Undercut: Cut Glass in Working-Class Life during the Long Gilded Age (forthcoming, University of Delaware Press, Material Culture Perspectives Series, 2026)
“A Leg Lamp Story,” Journal of Design History, published online on February 20, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epae013 (forthcoming in print 2026)
“The McKinley Bowl’s Services and Disservices, 1898-1901,” American Art 37, no. 2 (Summer 2023): 108-125
The Museum of Where We Are, ed. Joseph H. Larnerd (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
My research practice can be called decorative arts studies from below. I attend to the social implications of design and material culture in the lives of everyday people from the nineteenth century to the present, especially in the United States. Much of my work considers how the decorative arts as well as images and descriptions of these objects 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. My first book, Undercut: Cut Glass in Working-Class Life during the Long Gilded Age (forthcoming, University of Delaware Press, Material Culture Perspective series, 2026), offers one such study of cut glass, domestic glassware incised with geometric patterns and very popular around the turn of the twentieth century. I am working on a second book that will explore how laborers and common people reimagined factories and the objects therein as tools for self-expression, liberation, and dissent.
What histories might emerge from our careful, critical, and creative study of everyday modern design? Students in my classes offer some promising responses in The Museum of Where We Are: https://www.themuseumofwhereweare.com.