Benjamin Schmidt

Benjamin SCHMIDT is the Jon Bridgman Endowed Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA. His work sits at the disciplinary crossroads of cultural history, art history, 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 (ca. 1450-1750).

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; Going Dutch: The Dutch Presence in America, 1609–2009 (with Annette Stott and Joyce Goodfriend); and Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World, a finalist for the Kenshur Prize awarded by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and recently translated into Chinese.

His latest book, The Globalization of Netherlandish Art (with Thijs Weststeijn), reflects his interests in the various material encounters of the global Renaissance—for example, the correlative reception in early modern Europe of ‘china’ (porcelain) and China; Japanese fumi-e and the inadvertent circulation of Christian art; carved Brazilian coconut cups and the production of ‘decorative’ colonialism; and other case studies. An altogether different project, just recently launched, explores cultural responses to early modern cold, climate change, and the global effects of the Little Ice Age.