Richard Neer

Biography

Richard Neer is Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor in Art History, Cinema & Media Studies and the College and Director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he is also an affiliate of the departments of Classics and Romance Languages & Literatures. He works at the intersection of aesthetics and the history of art across Classical archaeology, early modern French painting and mid-twentieth century cinema, with a special interest in theories of style. His Ph.D. is from the University of California at Berkeley (History of Art, 1998), his A.B. from Harvard College (Fine Arts, 1991). He has received fellowships and awards from the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the J. Paul Getty Trust and the American Academy in Rome. From 2010 to 2018 he was the Executive Editor of Critical Inquiry, where he continues to serve as co-editor. In 2022 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Publications include The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture (2010), named a “Best Book” of 2010 in Artforum; Pindar, Song, and Space: Towards a Lyric Archaeology (2019), co-authored with Leslie Kurke, recipient of the 2019 PROSE Award for best book in Classical Studies from the Association of American Publishers; and, most recently, Painting as a Way of Life: Philosophy and Practice in French Art, 1620–1660 (2025).

Publications

Richard Neer

The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture

University of Chicago Press

2010

Richard Neer

Style and Politics in Athenian Vase Painting: The Craft of Democracy, ca. 530-460 B.C.E.

Cambridge University Press

2002

“Before Realism,” in Art in America (January, 2017)

“Bourdon, Bosse and the Rules of Art,” in Classicisms, edited by Larry Norman and Anne Leonard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press/Smart Museum, 2017)

“Pitiless Bronze,” in Art in America (December, 2015)

“Pindar Fr. 75 SM and the Politics of Athenian Space,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 54, co-authored with Leslie Kurke (2014)

“Classical Sculpture,” in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 2nd edition, edited by Michael Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014)

“Tumbling into Time,” in Charles Ray Sculpture 1997–2014, edited by James Rondeau (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago and Basel: Kunstmuseum 2014)

“Cosmos and Discipline,” in Heaven on Earth: Temples, Ritual, and Cosmic Symbolism in the Ancient World, edited by Deena Ragavan (Chicago: Oriental Institute 2013)

“'A Tomb Both Great and Blameless’: Marriage and Murder on a Sarcophagus from the Hellespont,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 61/62 (2012)

“Texte et image dans l'Antiquité,” with Susanne Muth, Agnès Rouveret and Ruth Webb, Perspective La revue de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art (2012)

“Sacrificing Stones: On Some Sculpture, Mostly Athenian,” in Greek and Roman Animal Sacrifice: Ancient Victims, Modern Observers, eds. C. Faraone, B. Lincoln and F. Naiden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)