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DFG-Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe Imaginarien der Kraft

Foto: Creative Commons/YaYapas

Prof. Dr. Claudia Swan

 

Curriculum

Claudia Swan received her PhD in Art History at Columbia University (1997). Her principal scholarly commitment is to northern European art, with a focus on the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. Her work on early modern art and visual culture contributes to intersections of art history, history of science, material culture studies, and the history of global trade and politics. She is the grateful recipient of numerous fellowships that have enabled her to pursue her research abroad and in the United States. Swan joined the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis as the inaugural Mark Steinberg Weil Professor of Art History & Archaeology in 2021; previously she served on the faculty and as chair of the Department of Art History at Northwestern University. Her most recent books are Rarities of These Lands. Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic (Princeton University Press 2021) and the co-authored volume Conchophilia. Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe (Princeton University Press 2021; paperback ed. 2023). She is currently co-editing two books with colleagues; one is on early modern conceptions of the elements and the arts, Elemental Forces in Early Modern Culture and the other is Thinking Inside the Box: Early Modern Cabinets, Chests, Cases. She is also working on two books of her own; one is a Short History of the Imagination and the other is on the Dutch Colonial Imaginary.

Publications (selection)

  • Making a Case for Ebony, in: Casale, Sinem (ed.): Journal of Early Modern History (Special Issue: Global Early Modern Art), expected in 2024.
  • Ebony & Old Masters: Blackness and Representation in the Dutch Republic, in: Jackson, Kéla / Mallory, Sarah / Seidenstein, Joanna (eds.): The Legacies of the Dutch Slave Trade: Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures, Boston, expected in 2024.
  • Rarities of these Lands. Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic, Princeton 2021.
  • Swan, Claudia / Bass, Marisa / Goldgar, Anne u.a.: Conchophilia: Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe, Princeton 2021.
  • Swan, Claudia: The Nature of Exotic Shells, in: Bass, Marisa / Goldgar, Anne / Grootenboer, Hanneke / Swan, Claudia (eds.): Conchophilia: Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe, Princeton 2021, pp. 21-48.
  • Swan, Claudia / Bakker, Paul / Lüthy, Christoph / Zittel, Claus (eds.): Image, Imagination, and Cognition. Medieval and Early Modern Theory and Practice, Leiden 2018.

Research project: The Dutch Colonial Imaginary

The focus of my research will be the power of global objects and of representations of global encounters, within the orbit of the Dutch trading empire in the early modern period. This research project builds on my longstanding interest in early modern theories and practices of the imagination—conceptions and misconceptions of how the faculty of mind called the imagination and or fantasy operated, with reference to works of visual art. Generally, imagination denotes a mental faculty that, in the medico-philosophical tradition stemming from classical antiquity, was called imaginatio and/or phantasia and the process of combining and reshaping experiences of the real, to form new realities or chimeras. This project pivots to a different approach to the question of the imagination, aimed at characterizing the Dutch colonial imaginary. It extends beyond the scope of my recent book Rarities of these Lands by considering latent forces in Dutch culture of the time and power relations whose most evident and horrifying historical traces were practices of and relating to slavery. Dutch colonial prerogatives had a variety of impacts on cultural expression, and I aim to investigate how practices—of making, of representation, and of charting the world—embody and inform what I am calling a Dutch colonial imaginary. How did the practices of colonialism (writ large) animate the imaginary and structure the status and understanding of objects up to and including works of art?

Research results: The Dutch Colonial Imaginary

During my residency at the CAS “Imaginaria of Force” I was able to complete two articles and to make progress on a book manuscript the broad subject of which is the Dutch Colonial Imaginary. The book manuscript, “A Taste for Blackness. Ebony in the Dutch Republic,” offers a reconstruction of seventeenth-century Dutch taste for the blackest of woods, ebony. Ebony is a naturally dark hardwood native to Africa and the Indies and was used widely in Dutch seventeenth-century ateliers, to make picture frames, mirror frames, chests, cabinets, and tableaux; it appears especially prominently after 1637, the year the Dutch East India Company fortified the tiny island Mauritius to protect access to the old growth there, harvested by enslaved laborers brought there by the Dutch. The ubiquity of ebony in mid-century Dutch aesthetics is borne out by myriad cabinets, chests, frames, and tableaux in addition to pictorial and textual evidence. Ebony is a material intrinsically linked to enslavement on the part of the Dutch, and “A Taste for Blackness” presents colonial materials, taste, and consumption as by-products of economic might and global access. Our seminar discussions and conversations with other fellows were deeply generative and enabled me to embed the concept of latency in my analysis of how works of art were involved in constructions of racial otherness in the early modern Dutch world.