Faculty

Claudia Swan (PhD 1997; Columbia University) is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History. She teaches courses on northern European visual culture 1400-1700, art and science, the history of collecting, and the history of the imagination. She is the author of Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland: Jacques de Gheyn II (1565-1629) (Cambridge University Press 2005), which studies the intersection of empiricism and witchcraft in Holland in the early seventeenth century through the work of de Gheyn II. It recreates, on the one hand, the praxis and precepts of natural historical investigation and, on the other, it explores the phenomenon of witchcraft as an image. She is also co-editor (with Londa Schiebinger) of Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press 2004); and the author of The Clutius Botanical Watercolors (Harry N. Abrams 1998). Her research on the Clutius watercolors was featured in the BBC documentary (1999) "The Winter Garden". Swan has been a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin; and has been awarded a fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in 2010-2011. Professor Swan is currently working on two books. One is a brief history of the imagination, and the other, The Aesthetics of Possession: Art, Science, and Collecting in the Netherlands 1600-1650, brings together four studies on Dutch early modern material culture, the market, and epistemology. She has published several articles on Dutch visual culture, and was a founding Director of Northwestern's Program in the Study of Imagination.

c-swan*at*northwestern.edu

curriculum vitae