Ashley West, Assistant Professor
ashley.west@temple.edu
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
M.A., Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art
B.A., Yale University
Ashley West teaches courses on Northern Renaissance and Northern Baroque art, covering the terrain of the Holy Roman Empire from Austria and Germany to the Netherlands, and from Bohemia to Spain. Her work engages many aspects of early modern visual culture. With a particular expertise in the history of prints, she is interested in the role of the graphic arts within the meta-narrative of art history that has tended to privilege the original, authorial work of art (Kunstwerk) over the creation and display of the religious cult image (Kultbild). She studies questions of cultural transmission and the dissemination of knowledge in the early modern period, as well as opportunities for artistic exchange through travel and portable objects, pilgrimages, diplomacy, warfare, global trade and exploration, and early collecting practices. In this regard, she also considers the flow of images, goods, people, and ideas across the Alps to the south and east to the Ottoman Empire.
Prof. West has several years of museum experience in curatorial and conservation capacities in some of the finest collections in the country, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Clark Art Institute. Her work has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) and Andrew Mellon Foundation, among others, and she has conducted year-long research at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich and the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin. Recently she has published on woodcuts of late medieval relic collections; history painting and the German sense of the past; and early representations of peoples from the coast of Africa and India. Her current book project reevaluates notions of the German Renaissance through the work of Hans Burgkmair, a contemporary of Albrecht Dürer.