2 new lecturers join the School of Art History

Ruth Ezra studies practices of art-making and scientific inquiry in early modern northern Europe. Her current book manuscript concerns the work of Nuremberg sculptor Veit Stoss (ca. 1447-1533). Proposing one model for how to write the history of art as a history of process, the book synthesizes findings from conservation reports, close looking, and hands-on reconstructions while also recuperating the importance of Stoss’s workshop ephemera. Research for the book has been supported by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Villa I Tatti, the Henry Moore Institute, and most recently, the International Center of Medieval Art/Kress Foundation.

A second major project, Leaves of Glass: Mica between art and science in early modernity, comprises a cultural biography of ‘Muscovy glass’ from its extraction in remote Siberia and movement in Anglo-Russian trade to its use as an ersatz window in objects as diverse as sundials, hand-held fans, perspective treatises, portrait overlays, and butterfly boxes. The project highlights the material ingenuity of female embroiderers, émigré miniaturists, and jobbing printers, figures heretofore kept at the margins of traditional histories of European baroque art. Initial research has just been funded by the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art. 

Before joining St Andrews, Ruthie served as a Postdoctoral Scholar with the USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities. She received her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University and her MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge. 

Anna Grasskamp’s research and teaching focuses on artistic exchanges between China and Europe, the histories of collecting and display as well as aspects of art and ecology especially in relation to maritime material culture.

Anna has published book chapters and articles that have appeared in journals that include World Art and Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics. Her first book, Objects in Frames: Displaying Foreign Collectibles in Early Modern China and Europe, was published in 2019, and her second book Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia. Shells, Bodies, and Materiality appeared in Amsterdam University Press’s book series Connected Histories in the Early Modern World in 2021. She has edited EurAsian Matters: China, Europe, and the Transcultural Object, 1600–1800 (with Monica Juneja) and completed the manuscript of another edited volume, Transformative Jars: Asian Ceramic Vessels as Transcultural Enclosures (with Anne Gerritsen).

Anna received her PhD from the University of Leiden. Prior to joining St Andrews, she held a post-doctoral fellowship at Heidelberg University and worked as a Research Assistant Professor and an Assistant Professor at the Academy of Visual Arts of Hong Kong Baptist University.