Co-Investigator
Benjamin Schmidt is the Giovanni & Amne Costigan Endowed Professor of History at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he specializes in early modern cultural and visual history. His most recent book, Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World, looks at the development of European ‘exoticism’ across several media. Previous books include Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World (2001), which won the RSA’s Gordan Prize and Holland Society’s Hendricks Prize; The Discovery of Guiana by Sir Walter Ralegh (2007); Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400–1800 (2008; with P. Smith); and Going Dutch: The Dutch Presence in America, 1609–2009 (2008; with A. Stott).