Anuradha Gobin holds a PhD in Art History from McGill University, with a specialization in the visual culture of the Dutch Republic. Her doctoral dissertation, Representing the Criminal Body in the City: Knowledge, Publics and Power in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic, explored representations of the punished criminal body as it moved in, out and through the city during punishment rituals. Anu’s thesis demonstrated that the dissemination of visual culture related to the delinquent body brought together seemingly disparate groups of people and solicited their participation, especially in the generation of new medical knowledge. This participation, however, may have been an unintended outcome of punishment rituals and underscores the increasingly collective and public nature of knowledge in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.
Gobin is currently a Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Société et la Culture (FQRSC) Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Art History and World Art Studies at the University of East Anglia. Her present research project, Visualizing Order: Punishment and Control in the Dutch and British Atlantic Colonies, explores a range of visual media focused on demarcating boundaries and representing colonial terrain in the Dutch and British Atlantic worlds. Forms of visual culture such as maps and landscapes are used to interrogate the ways in which notions of public life and behaviour, which were considered as integral to serving the good of society, were applied in the context of the colonies during periods of European expansion and occupation.