Faculty

Claudia Swan

Office: Crowe 3-132
c-swan@northwestern.edu
Curriculum Vitae

Claudia Swan (PhD 1997; Columbia University) is an Associate Professor in 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 the Dutch artist.

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). Swan has held fellowships and grants from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and the NEH. Professor Swan is currently working on two books. One is a brief history of the imagination, and a second on the first Dutch diplomatic or state gift to the Ottoman court (1613) and, more generally, on the trade in and collection and representation of exotic or curious or foreign objects in early modern Holland and related locales. The working title of this book is “Birds of Paradise for the Sultan and other ‘Rareiteyten van dese Landen’: The Dutch Gift of 1613 and the Exchange of Exotica in Early Modern Europe.” She has published several articles on Dutch visual culture, and was a founding director of Northwestern's Program in the Study of Imagination.

Publications for download

Claudia Swan, "Memory's Garden and Other Wondrous Excerpts: Ernst Brinck (1582-1649), Collector."

Claudia Swan, "Illustrated Natural History."

Claudia Swan, "Collecting Naturalia in the Shadow of Early Modern Dutch Trade."

Claudia Swan, "Eyes Wide Shut: Early Modern Imagination, Demonology, and the Visual Arts."

Claudia Swan, "From Blowfish to Flower Still Life Paintings: Classification and Its Images, circa 1600."

Claudia Swan, "Of Gardens and other Natural History Collections in Early Modern Holland: Modes of Display and Patterns of Observation."

Claudia Swan, "The Uses of Botanical Treatises in the Netherlands, c. 1600."

Claudia Swan, "Making Sense of Medical Collections in Early Modern Holland: The Uses of Wonder."

Carmen Niekrasz and Claudia Swan, "Art."