Carrie Anderson
Associate Director of the Axinn Center for the Humanities, Associate Professor of History of Art & Architecture
- Office
- Mahaney Arts Center 117
- Tel
- (802) 443-5051
- carriea@middlebury.edu
- Office Hours
- On-Leave-Academic Year 2024-2025
Carrie Anderson has been teaching in the Department of the History of Art & Architecture at Middlebury College since the fall of 2014. She received her PhD from Boston University, where she wrote her dissertation on the acquisition and dissemination of the Brazilian collection of Johan Maurits, the governor-general of Dutch Brazil from 1637 to 1644.
Carrie’s primary area of specialization is seventeenth-century Dutch Art, within which she focuses on themes related to inter- and intracultural diplomacy and exchange. Her work has been published in the Journal of Early Modern History, Artl@s, Early Modern Low Countries, and Oud Holland. She has also contributed essays to a number of edited volumes. Carrie’s first book, The Art of Diplomacy in the Early Modern Netherlands: Gift-giving at Home and Abroad, is under contract with Amsterdam University Press. Support for her research and teaching has been provided by grants from the Ada Howe Kent Foundation, the Historians of Netherlandish Art, and the Fulbright Program, the latter enabling her to teach courses at the University of Amsterdam and complete book-related research and writing in the Netherlands during her 2018/2019 sabbatical year.
Carrie’s interest in digital art history began as a fellow at the Kress Summer Institute on Digital Mapping & Art History held at Middlebury College in 2014. Since then, she has attended and participated in numerous digital humanities conferences and workshops and in 2017 published a literature review on digital mapping and the humanities in the Journal of Tourism History. She also co-edited a special issue of Journal18 (with Nancy Um, Binghamton University), titled Digital Mapping & Eighteenth-Century Visual, Material, and Built Cultures. Carrie is currently the co-leader (with Marsely Kehoe, Hope College) of a digital art history project titled, “Visualizing Textile Circulation in the Dutch Global Market, 1602-1795,” which is supported by grants from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation (with the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art) and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
At Middlebury, Carrie has taught courses on seventeenth-century Dutch art, the global baroque, early modern patronage, printmaking in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, and the arts of Spain and the Spanish Americas. She also co-curated the exhibition “A Story of Art: Gifts and Bequests from Charles Moffett ’67 and Lucinda Herrick” with the students from her 2017 winter term course.
Courses Taught
FYSE 1186
Printmaking/Time of Rembrandt
Course Description
Printmaking in the Time of Rembrandt
In this course we will study a selection of seventeenth-century Dutch prints from the collection of the Middlebury College Museum of Art, which includes etchings and engravings by artists such as Hendrick Golztius, Rembrandt van Rijn, Adriaen van Ostade, Nicolaes Berchem, and Cornelis Dusart, among others. Students will learn and write about the history of printmaking in the Dutch Republic by working virtually with the objects in the collection, as well as other primary and secondary sources. Students in this course will also write short essays to be included in an online catalogue of the Museum’s collection of seventeenth-century Dutch prints. 3 hrs. sem.
Terms Taught
Requirements
HARC 0100
Intro to Global Visual Culture
Course Description
An Introduction to Global Visual Culture
This course is an introduction to the visual cultures of the world, with an emphasis on how images, objects, and monuments are made, experienced, exchanged, and used by groups of people with diverse religious, socio-economic, and cultural backgrounds. We will focus on themes that have been taken up by different cultures and adapted over time, such as monumentality, the sacred, embodiment, science, and technology. Through a close study of these themes, we will consider how materials, cultures, and histories are transformed and negotiated through making and viewing works of art. In the process, we will challenge the art historical canon by shedding light on marginalized periods, regions, and artworks. 2 hrs. lect./1 hr. disc.
Terms Taught
Requirements
HARC 0250
Baroque Art/Global Context
Course Description
Baroque Art in a Global Context
Baroque art and architecture flourished in the courts of seventeenth-century Europe before spreading to the Americas, Asia, and Africa in the wake of global trade, colonialism, and religious proselytizing. In this course we will examine how this style of art and architecture was recontexualized and transformed when it came into contact with preexisting traditions overseas. Readings and discussions will compare artistic production across cultures by focusing not only on the forces that contributed to the broad reach of the Baroque, but also on the persistence of local artistic styles, which were challenged and nurtured by sustained intercultural contact. 3 hrs. lct.
Terms Taught
Requirements
HARC 0254
Vermeer's World
Course Description
Vermeers's World: 17th-century Dutch Art in a Global Context
The artists of the so-called Dutch “Golden Age”—Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer, Frans Hals, and many others—are best known for their portraits of wealthy Dutch citizens, landscapes of the local countryside, and scenes of domestic merry-making. The widespread popularity of images of local people and places, however, obscures the significant global activities of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century. This course will reexamine the works of these well-known Dutch artists by placing them in the context of global trade and colonialism. We will consider works in a range of media—including paintings, prints, books, textiles, and ceramics—that pictured and mediated diplomatic, social, and economic negotiations between the nascent Dutch Republic and the cultures it encountered across the globe.3 hrs. lect.
Terms Taught
Requirements
HARC 0301
Ways of Seeing
Course Description
Ways of Seeing
In this course we will focus on the various methods and theories that can enrich and deepen our understanding of art, architecture, and visual culture. Students will hone their analytical skills, both verbal and written, often with recourse to objects from the College Museum and the campus at large. In general, this seminar will develop students’ awareness of objects of culture broadly construed, and sharpen their understanding of the scope and intellectual history of the field. To be taken during the sophomore or junior year as a prerequisite for HARC 0710 and HARC 0711. 3 hrs. sem.
Terms Taught
Requirements
HARC 0313
Arts of Spain/Spanish Americas
Course Description
From Velázquez to Cabrera: The Arts of Spain and the Spanish Americas
In this course we will examine the art and visual culture of Spain and the Spanish Americas from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. We will consider the impact that religion, politics, and patronage had on artists working in Spain and the Viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, focusing especially on how visual traditions, iconographies, and practices were reshaped when they crossed the Atlantic. We will also consider how—in the wake of global trade and exploration—contact between Amerindian, African, Asian, and European artisans transformed artistic production, patronage, and collecting practices throughout the Iberian world. 3 hrs. sem.
Terms Taught
Requirements
HARC 0365
Art, Colonialism & DH
Course Description
Art, Colonialism & the Digital Humanities
The field of Digital Humanities (DH) combines computational or digital technologies with humanistic research. In this course, digital humanistic inquiry will provide the lens through which we examine the artistic, textual, and archival legacies of European colonialism from the early modern period (late 15th through 18th centuries) to the present. Our focus will be on the visual and material culture of the Spanish, Dutch, and English empires, which included paintings, prints, illustrated texts, ceramics, and textiles, among many other items. Readings for the course will interrogate the structural inequities of power engrained in these sources—many of which persist in museums and other cultural institutions today—alongside recent scholarship in the digital humanities. Students will learn to think critically about the emerging “digital cultural archive,” while also acquiring the skills to create their own digital projects.
Terms Taught
Requirements
HARC 0510
Upcoming
Advanced Studies
Course Description
Advanced Studies
Supervised independent work in art history, museum studies, or architectural studies. (Approval Required)
Terms Taught
HARC 0710
Senior Thesis Research Seminar
Course Description
Senior Thesis Research Seminar
In this course students will conceive, undertake research, and plan the organization of their senior thesis in art history or senior museum studies projects. Seminar discussions and workshops will focus on research strategies, conventions in art historical writing, project design, and public presentation skills. (HARC 0301; Approval Required) 3 hr. sem.
Terms Taught
HARC 1230
DataScience Across Disciplines
Course Description
Data Science Across Disciplines
In this course, we will gain exposure to the entire data science pipeline—obtaining and cleaning large and messy data sets, exploring these data and creating engaging visualizations, and communicating insights from the data in a meaningful manner. During morning sessions, we will learn the tools and techniques required to explore new and exciting data sets. During afternoon sessions, students will work in small groups with one of several faculty members on domain-specific research projects in Sociology, Neuroscience, Animation, Art History, or Environmental Science. This course will utilize the R programming language. No prior experience with R is necessary.
ENVS: Students will engage in research within environmental health science—the study of reciprocal relationships between human health and the environment. High-quality data and the skills to make sense of these data are key to studying environmental health across diverse spatial scales, from individual cells through human populations. In this course, we will explore common types of data and analytical tools used to answer environmental health questions and inform policy.
FMMC: Students will explore how to make a series of consequential decisions about how to present data and how to make it clear, impactful, emotional or compelling. In this hands-on course we will use a wide range of new and old art making materials to craft artistic visual representations of data that educate, entertain, and persuade an audience with the fundamentals of data science as our starting point.
NSCI/MATH: Students will use the tools of data science to explore quantitative approaches to understanding and visualizing neural data. The types of neural data that we will study consists of electrical activity (voltage and/or spike trains) measured from individual neurons and can be used to understand how neurons respond to and process different stimuli (e.g., visual or auditory cues). Specifically, we will use this neural data from several regions of the brain to make predictions about neuron connectivity and information flow within and across brain regions.
SOCI: Students will use the tools of data science to examine how experiences in college are associated with social and economic mobility after college. Participants will combine sources of "big data" with survey research to produce visualizations and exploratory analyses that consider the importance of higher education for shaping life chances.
HARC: Students will use the tools of data science to create interactive visualizations of the Dutch textile trade in the early eighteenth century. These visualizations will enable users to make connections between global trade patterns and representations of textiles in paintings, prints, and drawings.
Terms Taught
Requirements