Cullman Center Institute for Teachers: Imagining Nature in the Age of Discoveries, July 25 - 29

Dániel Margócsy, Instructor 

This is a week-long seminar taking place from July 25th to July 29th, 2016.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, European understanding of natural and human diversity was transformed by travelers’ encounters with new environments and cultures in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. In this seminar, we will examine printed texts, early maps, broadsheets, and paintings to consider how scholars, writers, and ordinary people reimagined their places in an expanding world. Readings will include travelers’ accounts of cannibals, poison trees, and satyrs; essays by Montaigne; excerpts from Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica; and secondary literature in the histories of science and art.

Dániel Margócsy is Associate Professor of History at Hunter College, CUNY. He is the author of Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age, and has published articles on cabinets of curiosities, the commercialization of science, the development of taxonomy, and the art of the Dutch Golden Age. He was a Cullman Center Fellow in 2012-2013.