Edward Wouk is a scholar, teacher, and curator of early modern art. At Manchester since 2012, he lectures at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels on a wide range of course units, from an introductory survey entitled Ice Age to Baroque to a set of Renaissance lecture and seminar course units devoted to Northern, Italian and global perspectives, as well as tutorials on topics including print culture, seventeenth-century Dutch painting, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, artistic theory and historiography, and material culture studies.  He supervises masters and doctoral students interested in early modern art, intellectual culture, cultures of collecting, and the history of print. He is Exhibition Reviews Editor (northern Europe) for Renaissance Studies and Head of the Department of Art History and Cultural Practices. He is editor of the Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art/Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek and a member of the advisory council of the Netherlands Institute for Art History RKD.

Edward regularly contributes to exhibitions and conferences on prints, printmaking, and the circulation of ideas and images in the early modern period, and has published widely, particularly in the fields of Netherlandish art history and print studies.  His research has been supported by grants from the British Academy, the Renaissance Society of America, the Lila Acheson Wallace Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Australian Research Council.

Major exhibitions include Marcantonio Raimondi and Raphael, co-curated with David Morris, held at the Whitworth in 2016-2017 and accompanied by a catalogue published by Manchester University Press with contributions by a range of international scholars as well as staff and students, and, in 2023-2024, Albrecht Dürer's Material World. This landmark exhibition, also hosted by the Whitworth, represents the outcome of a major collaborative research project developed in dialogue with colleagues at Manchester and partners in Europe and Australia. It was funded by the Australia Resesarch Council and assisted by the Getty Paper Project.

An American, Edward studied at Brown University (BA) and the Courtauld Institute of Art (MA), and completed his PhD at Harvard University in 2010 with a dissertation on the Flemish painter, draftsman, and etcher Frans Floris de Vriendt (1519/20-1570).  He has taught in art history departments at Harvard and the Universität Zürich.  He was a Fulbright Scholar in Belgium, a Reader in Renaissance Studies at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti in Florence, Italy, and held post-doctoral fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, where he collaborated on the project ‘Visualising Knowledge in the Early Modern Netherlands’. He returned to Villa I Tatti as the Rush H Kress Fellow for the academic year 2016-2017. In 2021-2022, he held a Leverhulme Trust Grant.

My research investigates the status of the image in early modern art from the ‘Guttenberg revolution’ to the Counter Reformation. Active as a scholar, teacher, and curator of early modern art, I frequently participate in international conferences, symposia, and exhibitions, and have published widely, particularly on topics concerning Netherlandish art and intellectual history, cultural exchanges between Italy and northern Europe in the early modern period, and print culture.

My first monograph, on the Netherlandish painter, draftsman, and etcher Frans Floris, appeared with Brill in 2018.  This book, the first study of the artist in over forty years, situates Floris at the nexus of a circle of patrons and scholars struggling to define Netherlandish identity on the eve of the Dutch Revolt. It interprets Floris’s hybrid style in the contexts of shifting conceptions of cultural, religious, and political autonomy.

My current book project, Print in the Age of Art, proposes a radical reinterpretation of the Renaissance told from a northern European perspective focused on the art of engraving. It maps Dominicus Lampsonius’s revisionist views on what constitutes ‘art’ against the embattled terrain of religious, political, and cultural upheaval convulsing northern Europe during the early decades of the Dutch Revolt and the Counter Reformation. This is the second major publication to emerge from a multi-year investigation into the history of Netherlandish artistic theory. In 2021, my critical edition of Lampsonius's artistic treatises appeared in the Getty's Texts & Documents series.

In 2022-2023, I co-curated an exhibition Albrecht Dürer's Material World at the Whitworth, The University of Manchester, which featured objects in a range of media borrowed from local and international museums as well as the first display of the Whitworth's Dürer collection in over fifty years. This collaborative exhibition and the accompanying catalogue published by Manchester University Press, arose from an international, interdisciplinary research project, funded by the Australian Research Council, which examined Dürer’s graphic art from the perspectives of material culture studies, the history of emotions, and digital microscopy.

Other collaborations have included my co-edited volume with Suzanne Karr-Schmidt, Prints in Translation 1450-1750: Image, Materiality, Space (2017) and, with Alison Hokanson, a special issue of Oud Holland entitled Early Netherlandish art in the long nineteenth century (2020).

I welcome applications for doctoral work on early modern art and material culture, especially topics that engage northern European art from an interdisciplinary perspective. I have recently supervised and examined dissertations dealing with subjects including Italian Renaissance architecture, Jesuit art in Japan and New Spain, drawing practices of Netherlandish artists in Italy, and the relationship between representations of the body and body politic in Dutch art. Current supervisions include projects on Gerhard Mercator's Atlas, Titian's engagement with print culture, and the visual representations of universal language in the early modern Low Countries. Students interested in working with local resources including the collections of the John Rylands Library, Chethams Library, Manchester Art Gallery and the Whitworth Art Gallery are encouraged to apply. Please contact me directly in the first instance.