Guest Researcher

Between January 10-21, 2024, Benjamin Schmid will be visiting the Department of Art History. Jon Bridgman Endowed Professor in History at the University of Washington, Seattle, his work sits at the disciplinary crossroads of cultural history, visual and material studies, and the history of science; and concerns itself chiefly with Europe’s engagement with the world in the so-called first age of globalism.

He has published widely on early modern topics, including Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, which won the Renaissance Society of America’s Gordan Prize and the Holland Society’s Hendricks Prize; Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts (with Pamela Smith); The Discovery of Guiana by Sir Walter Ralegh; and Going Dutch: The Dutch Presence in America, 1609–2009 (with Annette Stott and Joyce Goodfriend).

His most recent book, Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World, explores the development of European forms of “exoticism” – ways of looking at and imagining, representing and framing, the non-European world – in the early years of global encounter. A finalist for the Kenshur Prize awarded by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Inventing Exoticism recently appeared in a Chinese translation.