Welcome
These pages make available some of my professional activities and accomplishments. My research specialization is in the visual culture produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth century Low Countries. In my fortchoming book, Early Modern Dutch Prints of Africa, (Ashgate, 2012) I examine the ethnographic images in Dutch travel accounts and maps and the reception these early images received in the nascent Dutch Republic.
I am particularly interested in the nature and implications of Dutch exploration and trade in the Atlantic and how visual culture produced as a result of these interactions affected the process of knowledge and identity formation in the Netherlands and in indigenous societies.
I am continuing to study the visual mapping of identity in the Dutch Atlantic by examining the Dutch construction of physical and visual landscapes of West Africa, New Holland (Dutch Brazil), and New Netherland (Dutch New York).