Contact Information
Biography
Benjamin Schmidt is a Professor of History at the University of Washington in 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 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.
Current Projects:
- "Mediating the World: Global Matter, Entangled Things, and the Making of Modernity"
- "Seeing, Mapping, and Narrating the Cold: A Cultural History of Climate Change [the Little Ice Age]"
Research
Selected Research
- The Globalization of Netherlandish Art (with Thijs Weststeijn), Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2024
- Schmidt, Benjamin Inventing Exoticism Geography, Globalism, and Europe's Early Modern World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Paperback edition 2019. Chinese translation 2020.
- Schmidt, Benjamin. The Discovery of Guiana: by Sir Walter Ralegh with Related Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. Print.
- Schmidt, Benjamin. Going Dutch: The Dutch Presence in America 1609-2009. Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 2008. Print.
- Schmidt, Benjamin. Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400-1800. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Print.
- Schmidt, Benjamin. Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570-1670. Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Print. Paperback edition 2006.
Courses Taught
Winter 2025
Winter 2023
Autumn 2022
Winter 2022
Autumn 2021
Winter 2021
Winter 2020
Autumn 2019
Winter 2019
Autumn 2018
Winter 2018
Courses Offered
- "Exploration and Empire: The Art and Science of Global Power 1300-1800" (HSTRY 245)
- "Early Modernity: Culture, Politics, Power, 1300-1700" (HSTEU 301)
- "Spain and its Golden Age, 1469-1700" (HSTEU 361)
- "Curious Things: Objects, Wonders, and the Global Renaissance" (HSTRY 498)
- "Exoticism: Global Exchange 1400-1800" (HSTRY 388)
- "Cities and Courts: Culture and Society in the Baroque World" (HSTRY 400)
- "Traveling the Early Modern World" (HSTRY 498)
- "The Global Renaissance: Topics in Early Modern European History" (HSTEU 505)
Graduate Study Areas
Division: Europe--Medieval to Modern Times
Professor Schmidt offers a field covering the social, political, and especially cultural history of Europe from around the mid-fifteenth century through the mid-eighteenth century. Topics vary from year to year, and students tend to play a considerable part in shaping their own programs of study. Recent graduate seminars have examined courts and court culture; habits of collecting and the practice of early modern "science"; Europe's encounter with the Americas; the expansion of early modern geography and the culture of curiosity; the history of reading, literacy, and the book; visual culture in early modern Europe. Europe's engagement with the non-European world is also included in the field: early modern expansion, colonialism, and globalism.
Division: Comparative History (Comparative Colonialisms)
Students may work with Professor Schmidt to develop a field in Comparative Colonialisms that focuses on the early modern world. This field might focus on the West--the history of the Atlantic World and the colonial (and imperial) enterprises that commenced from ca. 1492--or the to the East, in the latter case considering how European interventions in Asia fit into broader, early modern colonial and imperials trends. This field would be done from a European perspective, to be sure, yet in a manner that explores how European colonial programs and golbal engagements fit into larger cultural and political developments of the period from ca. 1450-1750.