Professional Activity

Before joining the faculty at Georgetown, Al Acres taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Oregon, and Princeton University. His core area of research is northern European art of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. More generally, his work considers distinctive ways in which late medieval and Renaissance artists gave shape to highly specific ideas among appearances of the physical world. In addition to survey and monographic courses on European art c. 1300-1700, his teaching addresses the history of prints and conceptual topics ranging further afield in the western tradition since the Renaissance.

Sample publications:
"Porous Subject Matter and Christ's Haunted Infancy" in The Mind's Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Medieval West, edited by Jeffrey Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, 241-262.

"Small Physical History: The Trickling Past of Early Netherlandish Painting," in Symbols of Time in the History of Art, eds. Christian Heck and Kristen Lippincott, London: Brepols, 2002, 7-25.

"Rogier van der Weyden's Painted Texts,” Artibus et Historiae, 41, 2000, 75-109.

"The Columba Altarpiece and the Time of the World," Art Bulletin, 80, September 1998, 422-451.