Daniela Bleichmar: One of Smithsonian's 37 Under 36: Americas Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences

November 1, 2007

Daniela Bleichmar holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Art History and Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Southern California. She was trained as a cultural historian of early modern science, specializing in the history of the natural sciences in Europe and the Spanish Americas in the period 1500-1800. 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.

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 is the author of several articles on visual culture and natural history in the Spanish empire and a co-editor of a volume of essays on the history of science, medicine, and technology in the Spanish and Portuguese empire, to be published by Stanford University Press in 2008. She is also working on two new projects, one on collecting in the Spanish Empire and the other on the interactions of global trade, print culture, and empiricism in the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Most recently, Dr. Bleichmar has been named to the Smithsonian Institution monthly magazine's special issue, "36 under 37: America's Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences."

Click here to read the article in Smithsonian Magazine.

We asked Dr. Bleichmar a few questions about her endeavors, here is what she had to say:

Help us understand what you are up to (Describe your work / research):

In general, my research explores the connections between art, science, and cultural encounters in what historians refer to as "the early modern period," which roughly extends between 1500 and 1800. I specialize on contacts between Europe, especially Spain, and the Spanish Americas.

I am currently working on my first book, which will be called Visible Empire. Colonial Botany and Visual Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish World. This book will study the work of scientific expeditions%ue2%u20acespecially botanical expeditions%ue2%u20acfunded by the Spanish crown in the second half of the 18th century. These expeditions traveled far and wide throughout the Americas, from tip to tip: they covered Peru, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, the U.S. Pacific Northwest, Alaska. There was also a project in the Philippines. These were not "discovery" expeditions, like other voyages of the time, but we can think of them as "rediscovery" expeditions, since they attempted to explore the nature of long-held territories in search of natural substances that were also valuable commodities, such as tea, pepper, cinnamon, cinchona (a tree whose bark was used to treat malaria, the precursor to quinine).

This is a book that closely examines the role of the visual%ue2%u20acboth observation and representation%ue2%u20acin the production and circulation of scientific knowledge. I argue that we have underemphasized the importance of visual culture in science, and suggest that we think of these expeditions as "visualization projects". The book discusses subjects such as 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.

Beyond this project, my research and teaching focus on the history of visual culture, art, and science in Europe and the Spanish Americas 1500-1800; the history of the book and reading; and the history of collecting and display.

What people have found "innovative" about my work is its interdisciplinarity: I combine questions and methodologies from fields such as art history, the history of science, and cultural and social history. My Ph.D. is in History (I was in a History of Science program) and my appointment at USC is in the Art History and Spanish & Portuguese Departments. Traditionally, it has not been usual for a scholar to cross disciplinary boundaries in this way. But I think that I am representative of my moment, rather than bravely blazing a lonely path. I do not think I would have been able to think interdisciplinary if I had not been in settings and with people who encouraged it. I have received enormous support from my teachers and mentors, from the institutions where I have studied and worked, and from senior scholars. Once interested in a topic and a set of questions, I had to use everything and anything that made sense to explore them. The way I think of it is: neither intellectual curiosity nor history are bound by disciplinary lines, so why should I be?

What drives you to continue pursuing this area of study?

I love it and have tremendous fun with it! The main drives are intellectual curiosity, and a deep belief in the importance of scholarship and intellectual work as a project in itself. I don't think anybody will become a professor unless they really love to be a student. The best part of my job is that I am constantly learning%ue2%u20acfrom books, from students, from colleagues%ue2%u20acand I am constantly thinking. It truly feels like a privilege to be able to dedicate much of my time to learning and thought.

Describe how your work might impact people's lives, now and in the future. (What's the potential societal impact?)

It is often hard for scholars in the humanities to be able to point to concrete social effects of their work%ue2%u20acwe don't make medical breakthroughs, or turn them into treatments, or implement them into society. I am well aware that my work doesn't directly engage with many serious problems that face our world today%ue2%u20acenvironmental, social, economic. But I do believe that it is important for a society to support not only work that is practical and directly applicable to the present and the future, but also work that engages with the past and with those less practical but not less important elements of human life: history, art, philosophy, literature. Culture is what makes us who we are%ue2%u20acwhoever we might be; to be a scholar of human culture, in my mind, accomplishes important tasks of preservation and interpretation that are vital to society. And, of course, I also believe that teaching has enormous social impact.

How did you come up with the idea?

This particular project is not so much a single idea that struck me, but rather a combination of long-held personal interests in art, in the history of science and questions of epistemology (how we know what we know), and in the phenomenon of trans-cultural experiences. Starting with these personal interests, later on the pieces sort of fell together once I started studying, with some guidance from teachers in both college and graduate school. I had a set of interests and questions, and I just started reaching for the tools I needed to work on them. So, perhaps the idea here is: let the problem at hand guide what you need to do, rather than having what you know determine your approach.

Has anyone ever doubted that your idea could work?

If they did, they did not tell me!

What is the next step in the innovation process for you (and how might people help)?

After finishing this book, I have other research projects that I will pursue. Some important aspects will be practical: research funding; enough time to conduct research, to think (by far the hardest and longest part of the process), and to write. Time seems like a precious, rare thing these days. Other aspects are less tangible and have to do with intellectual curiosity and a deep commitment to the scholarly enterprise%ue2%u20acbeing guided by the deeper questions and impulses rather than the shallower ones.

What is the one innovation you can't live without?

Electricity, probably.

Email or phone?

Email!

Three favorite things about LA:

Great global cuisines, great art, a profoundly bizarre and varied human and social landscape to explore.