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 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 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, also published by Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard Center for Byzantine Studies, which is regarded as the standard work on the subject.