Coleman works primarily on Italian art from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. He has written on the art of sixteenth-century Lombardy and Piedmont, and has worked extensively on Italian old master drawings, including those in the collection of the Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, published in A Corpus of Drawings in Midwestern Collections: Sixteenth-Century Italian Drawings. 2 vols., 2008 and 2010. He has co-curated with Babette Bohn, The Art of Disegno: Italian Prints and Drawings from the Georgia Museum of Art, 2008, an exhibition which was shown in the Snite Museum of Art in 2009