Michael J. Hatch’s scholarship covers Chinese art from the 18th to the 21st century, with particular interests in materiality and sensory history. His first book, Networks of Touch: A Tactile History of Chinese Art, 1790-1840 (Penn State University Press, 2024), describes the early nineteenth-century obsession with epigraphy in China, and how it led to a form of tactile thinking that impacted all of elite visual and material culture. His upcoming projects include a co-edited volume about the exchange of antiquarian knowledge and craft across early modern East Asia, as well as a book about the effects of linearity on the brushwork of modern Chinese painting.
 
In the classroom, Prof. Hatch directs the natural curiosity that artworks produce in students toward larger conversations that bridge differences in time, culture, and language. He sees art history as a set of methods and tools that enable students to understand how their attention has been excited, to excavate historical and cultural contexts beyond those immediately available to them, and to ultimately open up new possibilities of being in the present. His courses cover various topics in East Asian art history as well as broad themes such as the art market, arts writing, pleasure, and landscape.

curriculum vitae

• Networks of Touch: A Tactile History of Chinese Art, 1790-1840. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2024.
• “Qian Du” and “Yao Xie.” In Creators of Modern China: 100 Lives from Empire to Republic (1796-1912), edited by Jessica Harrison-Hall and Julia Lovell, 115-118, 137-140. London: Thames & Hudson, British Museum, 2023.
• “What Can Ad Reinhardt Teach Us about Asian Art?” In American Art from Asia: Artistic Praxis and Theoretical Divergence, edited by Michelle Lim and Kyunghee Pyun, 36-50. New York: Routledge, 2021.
• “Outline, Brushwork, and the Epigraphic Aesthetic in Huang Yi’s Engraved Texts of the Lesser Penglai Pavilion (1800).” Archives of Asian Art 70.1 (2020): 23-49.
• “Epigraphic and Art Historical Responses to Presenting the Tripod, by Wang Xuehao (1803).” Metropolitan Museum Journal 54 (2019): 89-107.
•  “Lineages and the Posthumous Lives of Chinese Paintings.” In Posthumous Art, Law and the Art Market, edited by Sharon Hecker and Peter J. Karol, 189-199. New York: Routledge, 2021.
•  “Qian Du, Zhang Yin, and the Early Nineteenth-Century Interest in Wu School Painters." In Classical Revival: Research on Ming and Qing Literati Painting from the Xike Jiulu Collection, edited by Zhang Hui and Fan Jingzhong, 22-26. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2018. [In Chinese, trans. Chiu Shih-hwa]
•  “Xu Lei and Chinese Dreams.” In Xu Lei: New Works, 23-29. New York: Marlborough Gallery, 2016.
•  “Texture and the Chinese Landscape— Photograph-Paintings by Michael Cherney and Arnold Chang.” In From Two Arises Three: Creating a Third Space, Collaborative Works of Arnold Chang and Michael Cherney, 14-21. New York: Early Spring Press, 2014.
•  “Reviews, Beijing— Zhao Liang: Three Shadows Photography Art Center.” Artforum International 47.1 (Sept. 2008): 482-483.

• Faculty Leader of the Year Award, Miami University Art Museum, 2021
• Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017-2018
• Marilyn A. Papp Graduate Fellowship for Study in Chinese Art and Culture, 2013