Ashley D. West is an art historian of the early modern period, with a particular interest in the history, practice, and theory of printmaking and the art of the Holy Roman Empire, ca. 1500. She investigates processes of cultural transmission and the dissemination of knowledge, as well as opportunities for artistic exchange through travel and portable objects, pilgrimages, warfare, global trade and exploration, and early collecting practices. She has published on early etchings; history painting and the German sense of the past; early modern antiquarianism; and early representations of peoples from the coast of Africa and India. West is finishing her book on Hans Burgkmair and the visual translation of knowledge in the German Renaissance, which reevaluates notions of the German Renaissance through the prints, drawings, and paintings of Hans Burgkmair the Elder, a contemporary of Albrecht Dürer. Her project at Bard Graduate Center focuses on the materials and technologies of sixteenth-century Augsburg as a site for negotiating the global and the local in everyday experience.
West currently is the vice president of the Historians of Netherlandish Art. She has been a visiting fellow with the international research project “BildEvidenz: History and Aesthetics” at the Freie Universität in Berlin, and her research has also been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) and Andrew Mellon Foundation, among others.
West currently is the vice president of the Historians of Netherlandish Art. She has been a visiting fellow with the international research project “BildEvidenz: History and Aesthetics” at the Freie Universität in Berlin, and her research has also been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) and Andrew Mellon Foundation, among others.
