Transcultural Things

My first book, Transcultural Things and the Spectre of Orientalism in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania (Manchester University Press, 2023) explores visual and material modes of vernacular self-expression in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a confederate polity created in 1569. Focusing on the multiethnic context inhabited by the Polish, Ruthenian, Lithuanian, and Prussian nobilities as they sought a convincing narrative of their shared place in the world (despite their differences), this study examines how the often self-contradictory narratives that ensued were activated and legitimized by objects of material and visual culture, including maps, illustrated histories, articles of clothing, and carpets. While these artefacts acted as signifiers of localness and cultural distinctiveness, they were often appropriated from abroad, particularly the Ottoman Empire. Highlighting practices of objects’ mobility, adaptation, and cultural reappropriation, whereby exotic becomes local and foreign turns native, the book points to the exogenous underpinnings of cultural self-identifications—with focus on the role of culturally multivalent artefacts in shaping the meaning of localness. Transcultural Things brings to the fore the often-overlooked extrinsic aspect of nativism, using Poland-Lithuania—a place often seen as an ‘Orientalized’ realm—as a useful methodological laboratory for challenging the theories of nations’ and societies’ cultural distinctiveness. It reveals how the discourse of distinctiveness emerged in response to transcultural flows of people and artefacts, and how making sense of one’s own world was fundamentally informed by other cultures, and therefore was inevitably globally embedded.

Ecocide ART

Taking inspiration from the 1627 olifant at Stockholm's Livrustkammaren—fashioned from the horn of the last living aurochs—my second book, Ecocide Art: Extinction Management and the Material and Visual Cultures of the Jaktorów Forest Aurochs, 1500–1650, explores early modern art's impact on elite ecological awareness. It dives deep into the material and visual artifacts (including powder horns, rifles with aurochs scenes, and bullfight depictions) that represented and sought to reanimate the aurochs, an endangered—and, in time, extinct—species, with the last herd finding refuge in the royal wildlife reserve at Jaktorów Forest. The project probes how art evolved into a poignant sign of nature's fragility, and how the act of art-making played a dual role: contributing to ecocide through the celebration of animal-derived artistic materials, while recasting the animal as meriting protection in the face of imminent extinction. 

SEEING AND KNOWING BEFORE DEMI-ORIENTALISM

CO-AUTHORED WITH GRAŻYNA JURKOWLANIEC

Girolamo Ruscelli’s 1561 edition of Ptolemy’s map of European Sarmatia came illustrated with animals typical of this remote region of Europe—the only such depiction in the entire compendium containing 64 double-page maps of the world. One of these animals is urus, a wild cow that would become synonymous with the land where it appears to graze. My third book project, What’s that Cow? Seeing and Knowing before Demi-Orientalism (co-authored with Grażyna Jurkowlaniec), traces the textual references and visual representations that both preceded and followed Ruscelli’s image of the bovine interpreted interchangeably as either aurochs or European bison (or both). Exploring the association between the urus and the land of European Sarmatia, the book focuses on the transmission of naturalist imagery and knowledge from east-central Europe to the continent’s major centres of printing and information technologies. Recent scholarship has described the region’s status vis-à-vis western Europe as ‘demi-oriental’, implying that—beginning in the Enlightenment—central and eastern Europe was seen as a backward, semi-barbaric realm, doomed to copy ideas and models developed in the west, and thus unable to define itself, always only reacting to western European imaginings. Attentiveness to mechanisms of early modern knowledge formation, however, manifests a very different reality where western European scholars and publishers relied on the expertise of central and eastern European informants and the imagery they supplied. What’s that Cow? shifts attention away from the usual emphasis on western Europe to a neglected (and only allegedly marginal) east-central Europe, asking the question of how qualifying visual communication between the continent’s eastern and western halves as a wider, expansive network of shared expertise and distributed agency can reorient our understanding of early modern European visual culture. 

URBAN RESILIENCE (Project on hold)

After becoming the new capital city of Poland between 1570 and 1611, Warsaw undertook a period of rapid expansion. From a provincial backwater, it turned into a bustling metropolis, home to Polish and German burghers, Polish, Ruthenian, and Lithuanian nobility, as well as Jewish, Armenian, and Scottish craftsmen. New buildings and public spaces marked the expanding urban landscape, while newcomers brought these architectural structures to life. But what did it mean for Warsaw to rise to prominence during times of major climate instability? Answering this question, this book project (currently on hold), Urban Resilience in the Little Ice Age: The Rebuilding of Warsaw, 1596–1655, is set to explore how natural disasters, such as floods, cold waves, rainstorms, snow flurries, and epidemics—so characteristic of the period—affected the inhabitants of Warsaw and the ways they reimagined their city. The wider aim of this project is to ask how previously neglected material and visual evidence of Warsaw’s turbulent, unpredictable, and often very cold weather conditions caused by the Little Ice Age can help us rethink early modern cities along the lines of urban resilience and climate adaptability.