JEFFREY RUDA

Jeffrey Ruda (Ph.D., Harvard) is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of California Davis, where he was chair of Art History for twelve years, on and off. He is still an active member of the graduate faculty at UC Davis and has taught two seminars there since his retirement at the end of 2013. He specialized in Italian late medieval and early Renaissance art and published a monograph and catalog on the Florentine artist Fra Filippo Lippi (Phaidon Press, 1993). He has also worked with old-master drawings, writing an exhibition catalog of drawings from the founding bequest at the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento.

He became addicted to ceramics because his grad school roommate was stationed in Korea by the US Army and brought home a collection of medieval Korean stoneware. Recently, he has focused on ceramics from the founding period of the Crocker Museum, a Registered US National Historic Place dating from 1872.