Kenneth John Conant
architectural historian from the United States (1894–1984)
Kenneth John Conant (June 28, 1894 – March 3, 1984) was an American architectural historian and educator, who specialized in medieval architecture. Conant is known for his studies of Cluny Abbey.
Career
Born in Neenah, Wisconsin, Conant received a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts from Harvard University in 1915. He was considered the academic heir of Herbert Langford Warren, a teacher at Harvard, and through him, of the art historians Charles Eliot Norton and John Ruskin. He served in the 42nd Infantry Division of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I and was wounded in the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918. Conant later returned to Harvard. His dissertation on Santiago de Compostela Cathedral was published as a monograph in 1926.
Conant's lifework was the study of Cluny Abbey in France, which he excavated beginning in 1927, funded by his first of five separate Guggenheim Fellowships. He considered Cluny the preeminent accomplishment in all of architectural history.
Conant was an elected member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kenneth John Conant” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.