Ruth Ezra received her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University. She specializes in the art of northern Europe, 1400-1700, with a particular focus on sculpture produced in the German-speaking lands. A secondary interest is the history, philosophy, and visualization of early modern science, a field in which she earned an MPhil at the University of Cambridge. 

Her current book project considers sculpture in c. 1500 Nuremberg from a “practitioner’s stance,” offering a corrective to a “period eye” that assumes a non-expert viewer. The study also departs from the scholarly tendency to silo southern German carvers by signature style or material specialization; it seeks instead to demonstrate how inter-subjective and inter-medial the development of sculptural solutions to sculptural problems was, focusing on exchanges operating outside of traditional master-apprentice relationships. Research for this project has been funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, the Henry Moore Institute, Villa I Tatti, and the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, where Ruth recently held the Panofsky Fellowship.