Benjamin Schmidt
Benjamin Schmidt is the Bridgman Professor of History at the University of Washington. His work sits at the crossroads of cultural history, visual and material studies, and the history of science. He focuses chiefly on Europe’s engagement with the world in the first age of globalism. His books include Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, winner of the RSA Gordan Prize, and Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World, finalist for the Kenshur Prize. His most recent book, The Globalization of Netherlandish Art (with T. Weststeijn), is forthcoming this year.
Ben joined global dis:connect funded by the Munich Centre for Global History.
Decorative Colonialism: Coconut Cups and Dis:connections in the Early Modern World
Ben’s gd:c project focuses on global ‘things’ — material artifacts that can be literally grasped — and ways they dis:connect early modern global cultures. It analyses materials and material technologies that served as critical intermediaries in an earlier age of global entanglement — media that mediated, as it were, transcultural transactions. In Munich, he’ll be working on a set of carved coconut cups, enlisted to probe the possibilities of ‘decorative colonialism’: a heuristic device to understand how empire was materially consumed by early modern Europeans.