Michael Gaudio

Associate Professor

Office: 372 Heller Hall

Office Hours - Fall 2008

Tues: 2:00-4:00
and by appointment

Phone: (612) 624-0847
E-mail: gaudio@umn.edu

Michael Gaudio (Ph.D., Stanford, 2001) specializes in the visual culture of early modern Europe and the Atlantic world (ca. 1500-1800). His scholarship, which focuses primarily upon England and North America, examines the status and function of the visual image (especially the printed image) within the contexts of early modern science, religion, and cultural encounter. His publications have addressed such topics as visual ethnography, natural history illustration, cartographic practices, and landscape representation. His course offerings include “Renaissance Art in Europe,” “The Age of Curiosity: Art and Knowledge in Europe, 1500-1800,” “Prints and Print Culture in Early Modern Europe,” and “The Visual Culture of the Atlantic World.” He is also a co-organizer, with Juliette Cherbuliez and JB Shank, of the “Theorizing Early Modern Studies” (TEMS) research collaborative.

His book Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (University of Minnesota Press 2008) examines how the early modern technology of engraving has shaped western notions of the “civil” and the “savage.” Other publications include “Surface and Depth: The Art of Early American Natural History,” in Sue Ann Prince, ed., Stuffing Birds, Pressing Plants, Shaping Knowledge: Natural History in North America 1730-1860 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003); “The Space of Idolatry: Reformation, Incarnation and the Ethnographic Image,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 41 (Spring 2002); “Swallowing the Evidence: William Bartram and the Limits of Enlightenment,” Winterthur Portfolio 36 (Spring 2001); and “Matthew Paris and the Cartography of the Margins,” Gesta 39.1 (2000).

Site last modified on August 28, 2008

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