Katherine Kuenzli's research and teaching focuses on European and American modernist art and design. 

Her publications span French Impressionism and Belgian Art Nouveau to German Expressionism and the Bauhaus. Her first book, The Nabis and Intimate Modernism: Painting and the Decorative at the Fin de Siècle (Routledge, 2010), examines the multi-panel, architectural paintings by this group of French, Symbolist artists, especially Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, and Maurice Denis. The book repositions the group to occupy a crucial place in modernism’s development from 1880 to 1914, refocusing the narrative around ideas of decoration, totality (Wagnerism), and interiority, as formulated by the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Her work, funded by Fulbright, Chauteaubriand, and Dedalus Foundation fellowships, was prominently featured in the Phillips Collection’s exhibit and catalogue, Bonnard to Vuillard: The Intimate Poetry of Everyday Life (Rizzoli, 2019).

Kuenzli’s next two books, Henry van de Velde: Designing Modernism (Yale University Press, 2019) and Henry van de Velde: Selected Essays, 1889-1914 (Getty Research Institute, 2022), the latter undertaken with translator Elizabeth Tucker, demonstrate how the Belgian artist Henry van de Velde, in concert with the  art critic Julius Meier-Graefe, played a crucial role in expanding modernist aesthetics beyond Paris and beyond painting. Opposing growing nationalism around 1900, van de Velde made painting the basis of an aesthetic that transcended boundaries between the arts and between nations through his work in Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Associated with Art Nouveau and Jugendstil, van de Velde became a leading member of the German Werkbund and founded and designed the school buildings that would house the Bauhaus in 1919. Supported by grants from the ACLS, DAAD, Weimar Klassik Stiftung, Getty Library, and Furthermore Foundation, her work recovers how van de Velde’s art and writings helped shape the fields of modern architecture and design. The related publication, Henry van de Velde: Selected Essays (Getty, 2022), is the first scholarly edition of the artist’s influential writings. Funded by an NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant, the book's essays yield insights into a range of topics, from Neo-Impressionist painting and the emergence of women designers, to the role of the artist in the machine age.

Kuenzli’s most recent publication, The Belgian Friendship Building: From the New York World's Fair to a Virginia HBCU (University of Virginia Press, 2025), is  co-authored with Kathleen James-Chakraborty and Bryan Clark Green. The book explores the singular and striking interconnections at mid-century between modern European architecture and design, colonial exploitation, and African American achievement. The Belgian Friendship Building was initially designed as the Belgian pavilion for the New York World’s Fair, with exhibits from Belgium and the Belgian Congo. However, upon Germany’s invasion of Belgium, its contents were liquidated and the structure sold to a Virginia HBCU, where its reconstruction beginning in 1941 made it the first instance of modern architecture on a U.S. college campus. The book traces the building's unlikely transformation from the pavilion of a major colonial power to an iconic structure in Richmond, Virginia, where it became a harbinger of the civil rights movement.

Kuenzli is currently working on a study of Anni Albers's contributions to twentieth-century art and design, from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College, portions of which she will present as an invited guest professor at the École des Hautes Études Pratiques in Paris in 2025.