Richard Neer is Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, Cinema & Media Studies and the College at the University of Chicago. From 2010 to 2018 he was the Executive Editor of Critical Inquiry, where he continues to serve as co-Editor. He is currently Director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago, and is scheduled to return to the department of Art History in 2025-26.
Neer works at the intersection of aesthetics, archaeology and the history of art in multiple fields: Classical Greek sculpture, early modern French painting, theories of style, and mid-20th century cinema. His Ph.D. is from the University of California at Berkeley (1998), his A.B. from Harvard College (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. His most recent books are the second edition of Art and Archaeology of the Greek World: A New History, 2500–100 BCE (Thames & Hudson, 2018); Davidson and His Interlocutors, a special issue of Critical Inquiry co-edited with Daniele Lorenzini (Winter 2019); an edited volume, Conditions of Visibility (Oxford University Press, 2019); and Pindar, Song, and Space: Toward a Lyric Archaeology, co-authored with Leslie Kurke (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), which won the 2020 PROSE Award in Classics from the Association of American Publishers. He is currently writing a book on Nicolas Poussin, the Brothers Le Nain and their contemporaries, under contract with the University of Chicago Press.