MyHCHC
Director of the Archbishop Iakovos Library and Learning Resource Center
His Grace Bishop Joachim (Cotsonis) of Amissos’ area of research and academic inquiry is in the field of Byzantine Art. His particular fields of expertise are in the liturgical arts, manuscript illumination, religious iconography of Byzantine lead seals, and Christian iconography. He is one of two leading scholars in North America on the imagery of Byzantine lead seals. The seals are the richest body of evidence for the iconography of the saintly figures and their cult in Byzantium, and key documents for the study of both orthodox piety and the political use of religious art. His numerous articles published over the years in scholarly journals have now been republished as a two-volume set in the prestigious Variorum Collected Studies series of Routledge publishers entitled, The Religious Figural Imagery of Byzantine lead Seals, I & II. In addition, Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard Center for Byzantine Studies, has now published Bishop Joachim’s volume of his full-length study and analysis of the anonymous seals with bilateral sacred images from their collection, Catalogue of Byzantine Seals at Dumbarton Oaks and in the Fogg Museum of Art, Volume 7: Anonymous, with Bilateral Religious Imagery. Beyond his research on seal imagery, Bishop Joachim is the author of a book, Byzantine Figural Processional Crosses, which is now regarded as the standard work on the subject.
Before coming to Holy Cross, Bishop Joachim was an Assistant Bibliographer and Museum Exhibition Associate at Dumbarton Oaks Library, Harvard Center for Byzantine Studies. Over the years, he has served on the Governing Board, Program Committee, and the Local Arrangements Committee of the Annual Byzantine Studies Conference and was a Voted Member of the U.S. National Committee for Byzantine Studies. In April of 2007, he received the Alumni Award from the Department of Art History of The Pennsylvania State University. Bishop Joachim also participated as an iconographic consultant in the 2nd and 3rd International Sigillographic Workshops for the Digital Cataloguing of Byzantine Lead Seals (SigiDoc Workshop) held at Dumbarton Oaks in December 2010 and July 2011, respectively. More recently, in July of 2015 and July of 2016, he was invited to spend time at Dumbarton Oaks as a research consultant in order to focus on the group of their “iconographic” seals for the ongoing project of the online Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Lead Seals database. In addition, Bishop Joachim is the consultant for the iconographic program of the Greek Orthodox Shrine of Saint Nicholas at Ground Zero, World Trade Center.
