Ashley West is an art historian of the early modern period, 1400-1700, with a particular interest in the history, practice, and theories of printmaking.  

Her research extends to cross-cultural encounters between the Holy Roman Empire and its neighbors across Northern and Central Europe, rival empires, and outposts globally. She studies processes of cultural transmission and the dissemination of knowledge, as well as occasions for artistic exchange through travel and portable objects, pilgrimages, warfare, global trade and exploration, and early collecting practices. 

In her teaching she regularly incorporates on-site learning opportunities in the Print Study Room of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Mütter Museum, the Wagner Free Institute of Science, and Temple’s Special Collections of rare books. 

West currently is the Vice President of the Historians of Netherlandish Art. She has been a fellow with the international research project on “BildEvidenz. History and Aesthetics” at the Freie Universität in Berlin, and her research has been supported also by the Herzog August Bibliothek and Andrew Mellon Foundation, among others. 

Her project on Hans Burgkmair and the Visual Translation of Knowledge in the German Renaissance reevaluates notions of the German Renaissance through the prints, drawings, and paintings of Hans Burgkmair the Elder, a contemporary of Albrecht Dürer. She has published on early etchings; history painting and the German sense of the past; and early representations of peoples from the coast of Africa and India. She is currently working on the materials and technologies of sixteenth-century Augsburg as a site for negotiating the global and the local in everyday experience.