Katherine Kuenzli's research and teaching focuses on European and American modernism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Topics of special interest include art and politics; constructions of the total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk); interrelationships between modern painting, architecture, and design; boundaries between public and private spheres; formulations of international and cosmopolitan cultures; progressive art education; and museums, their history and public. 

Her publications include two monographs, The Nabis and Intimate Modernism (Routledge, 2010) and Henry van de Velde: Designing Modernism (Yale University Press, 2019), which was awarded a Furthermore Grant in Publishing. A third book, Henry van de Velde: Selected Essays, 1889-1914 (Getty Research Institute, 2022), is a scholarly edition and translation undertaken with translator Elizabeth Tucker. Future projects include a study of the Belgian Pavilion at the New York World's Fair and its subsequent reconstruction on the campus of Virginia Union University, with collaborators Kathleen James-Chakraborty and Bryan Clark Green; and a study of Anni Albers's contributions to twentieth-century art.

Essays and articles by Kuenzli have appeared in journals, including The Art Bulletin, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Art History, and Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide; numerous edited volumes; and in exhibition catalogues for the Los Angeles County Museum and the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C.

Her work has been supported by ACLS, Canadian Center for Architecture, Chateaubriand, DAAD, Dedalus, Fulbright, Furthermore, Getty Library, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, and NEH grants.