[3] After a year on a Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst fellowship at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany, he returned to Harvard and in 1992 received a PhD in fine arts.
His dissertation,[4] supervised by Henri Zerner, considered the landscape drawings, prints and paintings of Albrecht Altdorfer.
[8] Wood has published many articles on the art and culture of the German late Middle Ages and Renaissance, including essays on Albrecht Dürer and Albrecht Altdorfer; on drawings; on the cult of images and Reformation iconoclasm; on ex votos; and on early archeological scholarship.
He has also written on Italian artists including Piero della Francesca, Raphael, and Dosso Dossi.
Early archeological studies, archaism, and typology are the main themes of his Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago, 2008), which was awarded the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship.