Professor
Research and teaching focus: early modern art and cultural studies, specializing in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic and its colonial empire.
Vanhaelen is the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the Getty Research Institute, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Société et la Culture. Her book (Penn State University Press, 2012) was awarded the in 2013. A new book, has been published by Penn State University Press (2022). Engaged in overlapping programs of research, Vanhaelen’s work is attentive to the mobilization of artistic technologies in the histories of globalization, colonization, urbanization, religious conflicts, and the power dynamics of gender, sexuality, race, and class in the seventeenth century.
Publications and Programs of Research
Early Modern World Making: Colonial and Anti-Colonial Practices
Book Manuscript (in progress)
Making Black Worlds: Black Lives against Transatlantic Slavery in the Art of the Dutch Republic
Co-edited Book
. Co-edited with Bronwen Wilson. UCLA Clark Memorial Library Series, University of Toronto Press, in production, 2022.
Co-edited Journal Issue
. Special issue of Journal of Early Modern History. Volume 23, Issues 2-3, May 2019. Co-edited with Bronwen Wilson.
Articles and Chapters
- “Plantation Worldscape: Landscape as Enslaved Labour in Colonial Dutch Brazil,” commissioned chapter in Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Slave Trade: Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures, edited by Sarah Mallory, Kéla Jackson, Rachel Burke, Joanna Seidenstein. Under contract with Brill, 2023.
- “,” Journal of Early Modern History 23:2-3 (May 2019): 227-56.
- “,” Art History 35:5 (Nov. 2012): 1004-1023.
- “Local Sites, Foreign Sights: A Sailor’s Sketchbook of Human and Animal Curiosities in Early Modern Amsterdam,” RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 45 (Spring 2004): 256-72.
- , New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015. The Art Bulletin, vol. 98, no. 3 (Sept. 2016): 397–9.
Grants & Fellowships
Principal investigator, , SSHRC Insight Grant, 2021-2026; SSHRC Insight Development Grant, 2011-14; SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (UC Berkeley), 1999-2000
Conferences organized
- Making Worlds Core Program, UCLA Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies & William Andrews Clark Memorial Library:
- The Art of Peace: Dutch and Flemish paintings at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ new Pavilion for Peace / L’Art de la paix: Peintures hollandaises et flamandes au nouveau Pavillon pour la paix du Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, 2017
Art and Technology: Automata, Cities, and Power
Book
. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022.
Articles and Chapters
- “Strange Things for Strangers: Automata and Transcultural Encounters in Early Modern Amsterdam,” The Art Bulletin 103:3 (September 2021): 42-68.
- “Turnings: Motion and Emotion in Labyrinths of early modern Amsterdam.” Performing Conversion: Cities, Theatre and Early Modern Transformation, ed. José R. Jouve-Martin and Stephen Wittick. Edinburgh University Press, 2021, 35-61. Award: Honorable mention for the 2022 Stevens Award from the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society for best new essay in early drama research
- , University of Chicago Press, 2013. Times Higher Education.
Grants
SSHRC Insight Grant, principal investigator, 2015-2022; SSHRC Individual Standard Research Grant, 2011-14; SSHRC Partnership Grant, co-applicant, 2013-17
Making Publics: Art, Iconoclasm, and Religious Conflict
Book
University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012.
Co-edited Book
Co-edited with Joseph P. Ward. New York and London: Routledge, 2013.
Articles and Chapters
- “.” The Cambridge Companion to the Dutch Golden Age, ed. Helmer Helmers and Geert Janssen. Cambridge University Press, 2018, 225-246. (translated edition: “Spirituele kunst en cultuur.” De Zeventiende Eeuw, ed. Helmer Helmers, Geert Janssen and Judith Noorman, Leiden University Press, 2021, 290-311. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Translated by Frits van der Waa.)
- “Calvinism and Visual Culture: The Art of Evasion.” Cultures of Calvinism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Graeme Murdock and Crawford Gribben. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, 138-158.
- “Painting the Visible Church: The Calvinist Art of Making Publics” in Making Space Public in Early Modern Europe: Performance, Geography, Privacy, Routledge, 2013, 223–240.
- “Religion Inside Out: Dutch House Churches and the Making of Publics in the Dutch Republic.” Co-authored with Steven Mullaney and Joseph Ward in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe. People, Things, Forms of Knowledge, edited by Paul Yachnin and Bronwen Wilson. Routledge, 2010, 25–36.
- “,” Oxford Art Journal 31:3 (2008): 361-81.
- “Utrecht’s Transformations: Claiming the Dom through Representation, Iconoclasm and Ritual,” De Zeventiende Eeuw 21 (December 2005): 354-74.
- “,” The Art Bulletin 87: 2 (June 2005): 249-64.
Interview
“.” Episode 5 of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio series “The Origins of the Modern Public,” produced by David Cayley for the CBC program Ideas. April 30, 2010.
Grants, Fellowships, Awards
- Invited Guest Scholar, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Theme: Iconoclasm, 2018
- Roland H. Bainton Book Prize for The Wake of Iconoclasm
- Visiting Research Scholar, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2007-2008
- SSHRC Major Collaborative Research Initiative, co-applicant, 2005-2010; SSHRC Individual Standard Research Grants, 2002-2005; 2005-2008; FQRSC Programme d'établissement de nouveaux professeurs-chercheurs, 2004-2007
Gender, Sexuality, and Private Life
Book
Comic Print and Theatre in Early Modern Amsterdam: Gender, Childhood and the City. Aldershot, England and Burlington VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2003.
Co-edited Journal Issue
. Special issue of Art History. Volume 35, Issue 5, November 2012. Co-edited with Bronwen Wilson.
Articles and Chapters
- “Vermeer’s Secret Sphere: The Privations of Private Life,” commissioned chapter in Handbook of Early Modern Privacy, ed. Mette Birkedal Bruun and Sari Nauman. Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
- “.” Foreword, special issue, “Bodily Privacy,” European Data Protection Law Review 6:3 (2020): 346-51.
“‘Jan moet zitten spinnen, wiegen, want Griet heeft hem overmant.’ Seksestrijd in de Jan de Wasserprenten” (“‘Jan must sit spinning and rocking, because Griet has the upper hand.’ The Battle of the Sexes in the Jan de Wasser ʰԳٲ”). Sekse. Een Begripsgeschiedenis (Sex. The History of a Concept), ed. Myriam Everard and Ulla Jansz. Jaarboek voor Vrouwengeschiedenis / Yearbook of Women’s History 38 (2018): 40-56.- “,” Art History 35:5 (Nov. 2012): 874–85 (co-authored with Bronwen Wilson).
- “,” History Compass 10: 9 (Sept. 2012): 652-66.
- “Public and Private Intercourse in Dutch Genre Scenes: Soldiers and Enigmatic Women / Painters and Enigmatic Paintings.” Forms of Association: Making Publics in Early Modern Europe. Eds. Paul Yachnin and Marlene Eberhart. U Massachusetts Press, 2015, 115-132.
- “Stories about the Gallows Field: Power and Laughter in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam.” Power and the City in the Netherlandic World, 1000-2000, edited by Wayne ter Brake and Wim Klooster. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2006, 176–204.
- “Dutch Culture and the Politics of Difference.” Review of Wayne Franits, Paragons of Virtue and Els Kloek et al, eds., Women of the Golden Age. RACAR 21: 1-2 (1994), 137-43.
Teaching and Supervision
Professor Vanhaelen’s teaching overlaps with her research interests. She offers courses on early modern art and visual culture, historiography, methodology, and theory. She supervises graduate and postdoctoral students who specialize in early modern art and visual culture (1500-1700).
Selected Graduate Seminars
- Making Worlds. Art, Materiality and early modern Globalization
- Caravaggio, Caravaggisti, Caravaggio-mania: Painting the Destruction of Painting
- The Moving Image
- Advanced Pro-Seminar: Historiography and Methodology
- Between Worlds: Visual Strategies and Cross-cultural Mediations
- Boredom
- Making Publics / Producing Spaces
- The Disenchantment of Vision
- Iconoclasm and the Re-formation of Art
- Print and Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe
- The Visual Culture of Everyday Life
PhD Supervisions (graduates)
Isabelle Masse, “Médium du portrait, portrait du médium. Les spécificités historiques du pastel dans le long XVIIIe siècle” (2019)
- Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA
- SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship
- Dora Wiebenson Prize, awarded by the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture, 2017
Tomasz Grusiecki, “Globalizing the Periphery: Poland-Lithuania and Cultural Entanglement, 1587–1668” (2017)
- Associate Professor of Art History, Boise State University
- Postdoctoral Fellow, Central European University, Budapest
- Emerging Scholars Prize, awarded by the Historians of German, Scandinavian and Central European Art, 2017
Liana Bellon, “Souvenirs of Venice: Reproduced Views, Tourism, and City Spaces” (2016)
- Faculty member, Department of English, Dawson College, Montreal.
Sonia Del Re, “Re-forming Images: Caravaggism in Utrecht and Half-Length Single-Figured Genre Imagery” (2014)
Anuradha Gobin, “Representing the Criminal Body in the City: Knowledge, Publics and Power in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic” (2014)
- Postdoctoral Fellow, University of East Anglia, UK
Leah Clark, “Value and Symbolic Practices: Objects, Exchanges, and Associations in the Italian Courts (1450-1500)” (2009)
- McGill Faculty of Arts “Arts Insight Dissertation Award”
- K.B. Jenckes Award for outstanding McGill graduate in the Social Sciences and Humanities