April 30, 2009
Benjamin Schmidt of history to embark on Mellon New Directions Fellowship
Benjamin Schmidt, associate professor of history, has received a highly selective fellowship designed for advanced training of faculty members in subjects that are outside their own disciplines.
The Mellon New Directions Fellowship was awarded to just 10 scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences this year. It targets exceptional faculty who have received their doctorates between five and 15 years ago and provides salary support for one academic year plus two summers, as well as the costs of the special training. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation calls the fellowships “longer-term investments in scholars’ intellectual range and productivity.”
Schmidt plans to expand his training in history to include the study of material objects, particularly the role of decorative arts in the history of European empire. His research focuses on the European “age of empire,” specifically in the late 17th and 18th centuries, which witnessed the expansion of Britain’s and France’s power overseas. He will study premodern conceptions of “exoticism,” as expressed in the decorative arts — both those things manufactured in Europe which replicate, describe or are inspired by things that are foreign, as well as objects brought back from overseas.
He will spend a year affiliated with the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal College of Art in London, where he will pursue studies in the history of design and the decorative arts. Schmidt will work, more particularly, with decorative arts that have exotic motifs; examples include ceramics made in Delft, Holland, that were inspired by Asian motifs, as well as ceramics made in China and Japan, in many cases manufactured expressly for the European market.
“My primary focus,” Schmidt wrote in his proposal, “has been the processes by which cultures assess one another, the media that enable cultural exchange, and the ways cultural geographies are formulated.” Traditional scholarship in history is strongly text-based, but Schmidt’s recent research has emphasized material objects. “I am eager to expand the reach of my research and the intellectual questions I address by incorporating these material objects into my project, especially those dazzling products made in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a distinct high point in the decorative arts.”
Schmidt comments that the correlation of imperial expansion with expansion at home in the decorative arts remains understudied because of what he terms “disciplinary shortcomings.” His research is intended to shed light onto cross-cultural encounters, artistic interactions, and the nature of globalism. “My ultimate goal is to forge a cross-disciplinary way to think about globalism and cultural transaction — about art and power — and to accomplish this with a firmly historical and solidly material understanding of these vital topics.”
