Daniela Bleichmar

Daniela Bleichmar is Assistant Professor in the departments of Art History and Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Southern California. Previously, she held a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship through the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute. She was trained as a cultural historian of early modern science and visual culture, specializing in the history of the natural sciences in Europe and the Spanish Americas in the period 1500-1800. She received her BA from Harvard University, and her MA and Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Her work focuses on the production and uses of visual material in science, the history of collecting and display, the history of the book, and the history of the Spanish empire. She is currently finishing a book entitled Visible Empire. Colonial Botany and Visual Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Hispanic World, under contract with the University of Chicago Press. In it, she discusses the status and uses of images in eighteenth-century natural history; the importance of visual material in training the expert eyes and skilled hands of naturalists; the role of print culture in establishing a common vocabulary of scientific illustration; the interaction among visual evidence, textual evidence, and material evidence; and the ways in which colonial naturalists and artists appropriated and transformed European models, producing hybrid, local representations.

Her research and teaching interests include the history of collecting and display; interactions between art and science; Iberia, the Spanish Americas, and the Atlantic World; colonialism and imperialism; print, books, and reading; scholarly practices; travel; and anatomy and medicine. At USC, she has taught undergraduate courses on the history of the book and reading, on visual and material culture in colonial Latin America and early modern Europe, and on artistic and cultural exchanges between Europe and Asia in the early modern world, as well as graduate seminars on the history of collecting and display and the history of the book.

Dr. Bleichmar has received multiple prizes and fellowships for her scholarship, among them a Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship (2004-2006) and a Getty Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship (2008-2009). In 2007 she was honored by Smithsonian Magazine as one of "37 under 36. America's Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences." In December 2008 she received the USC College General Education Teaching Award.

She is the author of several articles on visual culture and natural history in the Spanish empire and a co-editor of Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500-1800 (Stanford University Press, 2008). She is currently working on a new project on the history of collecting in the Spanish Empire.

More information

Profile on USC website. Click here.

Curriculum Vitae. Click here.

Featured in Smithsonian magazine as one of "37 under 36. America's Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences." Read the article by Rick Wartzman.

HomeTeachingResearchResourcesContact