Aaron Rosen, Ph.D.
Head of the Parsonage Gallery + Advisory Board | International Arts and Culture Liaison
Dr. Aaron Rosen is the Executive Director of Bard College’s Clemente Course in the Humanities. He is a former Professor of Religion & Visual Culture and Director of the Henry Luce III Center for the Arts and Religion at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., and a Senior Lecturer in Sacred Traditions & the Arts and Deputy Director of the Centre for Arts & the Sacred at King’s College London. Previously, Rosen also taught at Yale, Oxford, and Columbia Universities. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. Rosen has held various honorary positions, including serving as Visiting Professor of Liberal Arts at University College Utrecht in the Netherlands.
He has written widely for scholarly and popular publications, including The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, CNN.com, and Times Higher Education, and often provides commentary for public radio in the US, UK, and Ireland. He is the author of Brushes with Faith (Cascade, forthcoming 2019), Art and Religion in the 21st Century (Thames & Hudson, 2015; pbk 2016), named one of the best books of the year by The Times, and Imagining Jewish Art. His edited books include Encounters: The Art of Interfaith Dialogue (Brepols, 2018); Religion and Art in the Heart of Modern Manhattan (Ashgate, 2015; pbk 2018); Visualising a Sacred City: London, Art and Religion (I.B. Tauris, 2016); and Religion and Sight (Equinox, forthcoming 2019). He is currently writing The Hospitality of Images: Modern Art, Architecture, and Interfaith Dialogue.
Rosen is committed to sharing his expertise with the wider public. He is the author of two children’s books, Where’s Your Creativity? (Tate, 2017) and A Journey through Art (Thames & Hudson, 2018), the first global cultural history for kids, which has been translated so far into seven languages. Rosen is also the co-founder of the global public art project Stations of the Cross, staged across cities including London, Washington, DC, New York, and Amsterdam. Rosen sits on the advisory boards for various academic and cultural organizations in the US and Europe and is delighted to be of assistance to those working in the areas of the arts, education, and religion, especially those with an interest in public engagement and intercultural dialogue.