Faculty at Home Webinar Series with Carrie Anderson

Of the many commodities carried on Dutch East and West India Company ships in the 17th and 18th centuries, textiles were by far the most numerous. Not only valuable trade items, textiles were also potent signifiers in an increasingly global world, where clothing played a critical role in shaping identities in colonial and European circles. Although extant examples of these textiles are scarce, painted images and archival documents hint at their social and economic importance. Drawing on research from an ongoing collaborative digital art history project, Professor Anderson’s presentation will explore the various meanings attached to blue-and-white textiles, which were frequently described in archival documents and pictured in images.

Carrie Anderson (PhD, Boston University), associate professor of history of art and architecture, has been with Middlebury College since 2014. Her primary area of specialization is 17th-century Dutch art, within which she focuses on themes related to inter- and intracultural diplomacy and exchange. 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, and she is the co-PI of the in-progress digital art history project Visualizing Textile Circulation in the Dutch Global Market, 1602–1795.