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 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.
Current Project:
- "Mediating the World: Early Modern Things and the Making of Modernity"