Fred Kleiner is a prize-winning author and teacher who received his BA degree with honors in art history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968 and his MA and PhD degrees in art history and archaeology from Columbia University in 1969 and 1973. After serving as an Agora Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens from 1973–1975 and Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Virginia from 1975–1978, he moved to Boston University, where he taught for nearly a half century. The winner of multiple teaching prizes, including Boston University’s highest honor, the Metcalf Teaching Award, he is renowned for his inspiring lectures on ancient and medieval art. Fred’s more than 100 publications include Gardner’s Art through the Ages, the most widely read introduction to the history of art in the English language, now in its 16th edition, which won the coveted Texty Prize of the Text and Academic Authors Association, as well as A History of Roman Art (2nd edition, 2019), also a Texty winner. Both titles have been translated into Chinese. From 1985 to 1998, Fred was the Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Archaeology, the flagship scholarly journal of the Archaeological Institute of America. In addition to his teaching and writing, Dr. Kleiner serves as a trustee of the American Institute for Roman Culture and the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, and he is a member of the President’s International Council of the World Monuments Fund.
Dr. Kleiner has been traveling through the ancient and medieval lands of Europe and the Mediterranean for nearly 60 years. In the 1970s, he lived in Europe for four years, first in Rome and then in Athens. When he stands before you at the Pont du Gard, the Arles amphitheater, or the Last Judgment portal at Autun, you are seeing the monuments through the eyes of someone who not only has an intimate knowledge of the Roman and Romanesque sites, but who literally wrote the book.
