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, in 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 art works, 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 saints, several articles on the function of altarpieces, and recently Jacopo Bellini. He is currently working on a book reassessing portraiture as a renaissance genre.