Bailey Fernandez earned a BA from Hampshire College and an MA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research centers around 19th- and 20th-century German and Austrian art historical contexts, image theory broadly considered, computation and the arts (especially graphics and sound), and the intersection between the humanities and the analytical tradition in philosophy. He has a lifelong interest in the British poet and artist William Blake.

His project concerns interactions between three areas of inquiry. First, art historians have expressed interest in the “philosophy of action,” a branch of philosophy concerning agents' "intentions." Second, contemporary philosophers have become interested in German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's approach to action problems. Third, Hegel significantly influenced the Vienna School of Art History—art historians operating out of the University of Vienna in the later 19th and early 20th centuries—whose methodological conflicts in turn influenced art history's disciplinary foundations. In his interdisciplinary project, Bailey argues that the historical debates of the third can be made relevant to the first set of problems by means of the methodology developed in the second.

Bailey is also a passionate teacher of the humanities. As part of his Fulbright grant, he works as a US teaching assistant at the Mater Salvatoris AHS Gymnasium and Elementärpedagogik Bildungszentrum in Vienna's eighth district.