Joseph Hammond is an assistant professor in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut. He earned his PhD from the University of St Andrews, Scotland (2011), was a research associate at the Centre for Advanced Study of the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC until 2014, subsequently he was a fellow at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies at the University of Toronto. His area of interest is the visual, material, and religious culture of renaissance Venice. He is particularly interested in the function of artworks, their use and re-use in different contexts, and the historiography and institutional history of the discipline of art history. He has published on the cult of the saints, the function of altarpieces, Jacopo Bellini, and most recently on images and ideas of Death in the early Renaissance. He is currently working on a book reassessing portraiture as a renaissance genre.