Christopher Wood is Professor of German, Chair of the Department of German, and Director of Graduate Studies at New York University, positions he has held since joining the institution in 2014. Prior to NYU, he taught for twenty-two years (1992-2014) in the Department of History of Art at Yale University, where he specialized in Northern Renaissance art, particularly the works of Albrecht Dürer and his German contemporaries. Wood received his A.B. in History and Literature from Harvard University in 1983 and his Ph.D. in Fine Arts from the same institution in 1991, with a dissertation on the origins of landscape painting, published as Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape (Reaktion Books and University of Chicago Press, 1993; revised edition 2014). As a Jacob Wendell Scholar and Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, he trained in European history and literature from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, alongside philosophy, history of ideas, literary theory, and art history.

Wood's research interests encompass pre-1800 German literature, Goethe, Romanticism, German art, European art from 1300 to 1800, early modern realism and narrative, narratology, history of religion, art and anthropology, history of art history, folk and popular cultures, fairy tales, and portraiture. Key publications include editor of The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s (ZONE Books, 2000); Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (University of Chicago Press, 2008; winner of the 2009 Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship); Anachronic Renaissance (with Alexander Nagel, ZONE Books, 2010); A History of Art History (Princeton University Press, 2019; short-listed for Apollo Book of the Year Award); and The Embedded Portrait: Giotto, Giottino, Angelico (Princeton University Press, 2023). He has translated Erwin Panofsky's Perspective as Symbolic Form (ZONE Books, 1991) and Hans Belting's The End of the History of Art? (University of Chicago Press, 1987). Since November 2023, Wood has served as Editor of Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics. His fellowships include John Simon Guggenheim (2002), NEH Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome (2002), Ellen Maria Gorrissen at the American Academy in Berlin (2004), Institute for Advanced Study Princeton (2011-12), and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been a visiting professor at UC Berkeley, Vassar College, Hebrew University, NYU-Shanghai, and Villa I Tatti.

Professional Email: christopher.wood@nyu.edu