Elizabeth Langsford Sears (born 1952)^[1] is Professor Emerita, George H. Forsyth Jr. Collegiate History of Art at the University of Michigan. She is known for the study of European medieval art and the historiography of art.^[2]

Sears attended Duke University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1974. She earned her master's degree and Ph.D. from Yale University in 1982,^[3] writing on "the ages of man" under professor Walter Cahn.^[4]

Sears is the Professor Emerita, George H. Forsyth Jr. Collegiate History of Art at University of Michigan.^[5][6] She also taught at the Universität Hamburg and Princeton University.^[3]

• Verzetteln als Methode: Der humanistische Ikonologe William S. Heckscher (2008), co-authored with Charlotte Schoell-Glass, Hamburger Forschungen zur Kunstgeschichte, Akademie Verlag.^[7]
• With Edgar Wind, The Religious Symbolism of Michelangelo: The Sistine Ceiling (2000), editor, Oxford University Press.^[8]
• The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle (1986), Princeton University Press.^[9] (winner of the John Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America in 1990)^[10]

Sears is the recipient of numerous awards including a Paul Mellon Centre Fellowship at the British School at Rome in 2004,^[11] a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library, 2019-2020.^[5][3] Also in 2010 Sears was the Paul Mellon Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.^[12]