Christopher Wood

pre-1800 German literature; Goethe; Romanticism; German art; European art 1300-1800; early modern or premodern realism, prose, narrative; narratology; history of religion; art and anthropology; history of art history; folk, popular, and mass cultures; folk tale and fairy tale; portraiture

I was trained at Harvard University in European history and literature, late middle ages to the eighteenth century.  I also studied philosophy, history of ideas, literary theory and “theory” generally, as well as art history.  At a certain point I shifted my interests mainly to the history of art, and I received my Ph.D. in that field, also at Harvard, with a dissertation on the origins of landscape painting (published in 1993 as Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape.) 

I taught for twenty-two years (1992-2014) in the Department of History of Art at Yale University, where I was responsible for the field of Northern Renaissance art (Netherlandish and German, mainly, with a focus on Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) and the German artists of his generation.  In this period I published an anthology of writings of the so-called Vienna School of Art History, an innovative and influential episode in art history:  The Vienna School Reader:  Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s.  In 2008 I published Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art; in 2010, together with Alexander Nagel, Anachronic Renaissance.

(Links to these books, or portions of them, as well as virtually all my published articles and essays, can be found on my personal website.)

In 2014 I was lucky enough to get an appointment in the German Department here at NYU.  This unexpected opportunity allowed me to return to some of my original involvements with literature and literary theory.  I have taught some art history at NYU, principally for the Department of Art History and for the First-Year Seminar Program.  But a lot of my teaching in the last decade has addressed late medieval and early modern (14^th to 18^th centuries) literature, German and European, as well as courses on Romanticism, Goethe, the concept of the avant-garde, and folk and fairy tales.         

I have been awarded several fellowships which have allowed me to spend semesters or entire years in Rome, Berlin, Vienna, Florence, and Princeton.  I have also been Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley, Vassar College, and the Hebrew University.  In 2019 I taught for a semester at NYU-Shanghai.

In 2019 I published a book synthesizing all my work on the history of the discipline of art history, A History of Art History.  Most recently, in 2023, I published The Embedded Portrait:  Giotto, Giottino, Angelico.

Since November 2023 I have been the Editor of the journal Res:  Anthropology and Aesthetics.

My teaching at the graduate level has mainly addressed German and more broadly European culture (literature, art) in the pre-modern period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries).  Several seminars have addressed the problem of realism:  the representation in literature and art of everyday life and experience.  Another seminar dealt with non-elite creativity: so-called “folk” culture in the premodern period, popular and mass cultures in the modern period.  Still another aspect of my graduate teaching has been the “culture of art” in Germany of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: art history, art theory, archeology, and museums in the age of Goethe (the Kunstperiode—the “period of art” —in the phrase of Heinrich Heine).

My aim in such historically-oriented seminars is to develop concepts and hypotheses that can serve as a framework for students’ own research.  After several weeks of reading and discussion, the students begin preparing their research papers which they will later present orally in seminar.

Another group of seminars have engaged with questions of method and theory:  theories of acting and performance, for example, or the archive centered on Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever; or the Kulturwissenschaft pioneered by the German art historian Aby Warburg.

I welcome the chance to work with students who take an interest in any of these topics, or indeed other questions whether historical or theoretical.

Fellowships

Jacob Wendell Scholarship, Harvard University

Deutscher Akademischer Austauschsdienst (DAAD) fellowship, Munich

Junior Fellow, Society of Fellows, Harvard University

Guest scholar, Institut für Europäische Kulturgeschichte, Augsburg; John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship

NEH / Rome Prize Fellowship, American Academy in Rome

Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow, American Academy in Berlin; Member, School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

Senior Fellow, Internationales Forschungszentrum für Kulturwissenschaften, Vienna

Fellow, Kolleg-Forschergruppe BildEvidenz, Freie Universität Berlin; Fellow, Center for Ballet and the Arts, New York University; Francesco de Dombrowski Visiting Professor, Villa I Tatti

Fellow, Kolleg-Forschergruppe BildEvidenz, Freie Universität Berlin

Aby Warburg Professorship, Warburg-Haus, Hamburg

Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Awards

Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, for Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art

Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Jacob-Burckhardt-Preis des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz

Aby Warburg Professorship, Aby-Warburg-Stiftung and Warburg-Haus, Hamburg

Some of my graduate seminars have been

• Early Modern Realisms
• Folk, popular and mass cultures
• The Culture of Art in Germany, 1750-1830
• Aby Warburg
• Theories of Acting (with Rosemarie Brucher)
• The Culture of the Renaissance:  A Re-Translation (with Juliet Fleming)
• Derrida’s Archive Fever (with Juliet Fleming)