Keynote Address by Carrie Anderson Friday, December 9, 2022, 5:30pm
Presentations Saturday, December 10, 2022, 1pm - 5pm *schedule below
location: Stone Auditorium, 210 Woldenberg Art Center, Tulane University
Dutch Americas Symposium Program (pdf)
On December 9-10, 2022, the Newcomb Art Department will host a symposium marking the end of the first iteration of the Dutch Americas humanities lab, co-taught by Stephanie Porras at Tulane and Aaron Hyman at Johns Hopkins. On Friday, December 9th, Professor Carrie Anderson will deliver a keynote address on the topic of the Dutch West India Company’s presence in the Atlantic world. The following day, graduate students from Hopkins and Tulane will be presenting their final projects - object-based research on the visual and material culture of the Dutch West India Company (WIC). The WIC, founded in 1621, traded across the Atlantic, with footholds in regions of New York, Curaçao, Guyana, Brazil, Suriname, Ghana and Benin – dealing primarily in fur, tobacco, sugar, gold and enslaved Africans. Modeled on laboratory courses in the sciences, the seminar saw teams comprising of students from both schools working on a specific geography (New Netherland/New York, the Caribbean, West Africa, Brazil) working together in order to identify, research, catalog, and publish relevant items in a web-based database. This symposium celebrates and reflects on this groundbreaking foundational research in an emerging field of art historical scholarship, the assembly of a corpus of objects, sites, and materials related to the Dutch trading companies present in the Americas.
The symposium is supported by Johns Hopkins and the Newcomb College Institute’s Dorothy Beckemeyer Skau Art and Music Fund.
Presentations Saturday, December 10, 2022, 1pm - 5pm
1 Introduction by Aaron Hyman and Stephanie Porras
1:15 Hannah Kay Prescott, University of Maryland: Between East and West: An Akan Sword in the Danish Royal Kunstkammer
1:35 Xena Fitzgerald, Tulane: Crossing Colonies, Crossing Christianities: A Baptismal Font as Christian Gift Across the South American Atlantic
1:50 Marco Pomini, Johns Hopkins: Frans Post's Sacrifice of Manoah: The Biblical Past and the Brazilian Landscape
2:20 Final Discussion
3:00 Coffee Break
3:30 Alex Landry, Tulane: Not Intended for Trade: Local West African Objects and the Dutch West India Company
3:50 Lauren Cook, Johns Hopkins: Collecting the Caribbean: The Souvenirs of Gerrit Schouten
4:10 Kaillee Coleman, Tulane: Present Labor, Absented Bodies: Shifting Labor-Landscapes in the Dutch Caribbean Imaginary
4:30 Final discussion