Jeffrey Chipps Smith held the Kay Fortson Chair in European Art and joined the faculty at the University of Texas in 1979 shortly after receiving his Ph.D. from Columbia University. His publications range widely on German and Netherlandish art from 1400 to 1700. These include:
- Nuremberg, A Renaissance City, 1500-1618 (Austin, 1983)
- German Sculpture of the Later Renaissance, c. 1520-1580: Art in an Age of Uncertainty (Princeton, 1994)
- Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (Princeton, 2002)
- The Northern Renaissance (London, 2004 with several reprints) and published in a Greek translation in 2005
- The Art of the Goldsmith in late Fifteenth-Century Germany: The Kimbell Virgin and Her Bishop (New Haven, 2006)
- Dürer (London, 2012)
- Albrecht Dürer and the Embodiment of Genius: Decorating Museums in the Nineteenth Century (University Park, 2020)
- Kunstkammer: Early Modern Art and Curiosity Cabinets in the Holy Roman Empire (London, 2022)
- Albrecht Dürer’s Afterlife (London, 2024)
- Editor, New Perspectives on the Art of Renaissance Nuremberg: Five Essays (Austin, 1985)
- Editor, Visual Acuity and the Arts of Communication in Early Modern Germany (Farnham, 2014)
- Co-editor with Larry Silver, The Essential Dürer (Philadelphia, 2010; paperback 2011)
- Introduction to Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer [Princeton Classic Edition] (Princeton, 2005)
- Catharine Ingersoll, Alisa McCusker, and Jessica Weiss, eds., Imagery and Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey Chipps Smith (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018)
Smith was the Mercator Fellow at the University of Hamburg’s Graduiertenkolleg Interkonfessionalität in der frühen Neuzeit in summer 2023. He has been a visiting scholar-in-residence at the Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas e. V. at the University of Leipzig in June and July 2006; the holder of the Anna-Maria Kellen Berlin Prize, a residential fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin in January–May 2010; and the Distinguished International Visiting Fellow of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at the Universities of Western Australia (Perth), Melbourne, and Queensland (Brisbane) in August 2012. He directed the 40th International Wolfenbüttel Summer Course (“Art, Reformation, and the Cult of Martin Luther”) at the Herzog August Bibliothek in July 2016. Smith is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1998–99), the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung of Bonn (1985–86, summer 1988, 1992–93), American Council of Learned Societies, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, Getty Grant Program, the Kimbell Art Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. Smith’s books have garnered numerous book prizes. He served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Historians of Netherlandish Art (1989–94), College Art Association (1996–2000), Renaissance Society of America (2000–09, 2013–19), Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (2004–07), and Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär (2007–12; and as President 2008–12). Smith served as the Articles Editor of the Renaissance Quarterly (2003–06) and Associate Editor (2000–03 and 2006–09). He is one of the inaugural co-editors (2008–13) of the Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art.