Faculty

Claudia Swan (Ph.D. 1997, Columbia; Associate Professor) studies the relations between early modern science and art, with a special emphasis on Netherlandish visual culture 1550-1700. She teaches courses on northern European visual culture, 1400-1700, and art criticism and theory. Her most recent book, Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland. Jacques de Gheyn II (1565-1629) (Cambridge University Press 2005), studies the intersection of empiricism and belief in and representation of witches in Holland in the early seventeenth century. She has also published a co-edited volume (with Londa Schiebinger) on Colonial Botany. Science, Commerce, Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press 2004) and The Clutius Botanical Watercolors (1998), a collection of late 16th-century watercolors used in the instruction of medicine at Leiden University. Her research on the Clutius watercolors was the basis of a 1999 BBC documentary ("The Winter Garden"). Swan has been a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1998-1999) and a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2002). She is currently working on a brief history of the imagination as well as a collection of essays on "The Aesthetics of Possession. Art, Science, and Collecting in the Netherlands 1600-1650." She has published several articles on Dutch visual culture, and is a founding Director of Northwestern's Program in the Study of Imagination (www.psi.northwestern.edu ). She is currently the Chair of the Department of Art History.

c-swan*at*northwestern.edu

curriculum vitae