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Daniela Bleichmar
Daniela Bleichmar

Daniela Bleichmar

Assistant Professor of Art History and of Spanish and Portuguese
USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

What sets Daniela Bleichmar apart as an academic is the interdisciplinary nature of her work. An assistant professor of art history and of Spanish and Portuguese in USC College, Bleichmar combines questions and methodologies from fields spanning art history, the history of science, and cultural and social history.

This “interdisciplinarity” is evident in her research and teaching at USC, which focus on the history of visual culture, art, and science in Europe and the Spanish Americas from 1500 to 1800; the history of the book and reading; and the history of collecting and display.

The seeds of Bleichmar’s imaginative approach were planted during her graduate studies at Princeton University, when she set out to investigate the history of natural sciences in the Spanish Americas and stumbled upon thousands of untapped historical sources that hadn’t been plumbed – even though they had been right under scholars’ noses all along.

What she discovered was a treasure trove of carefully rendered illustrations chronicling expeditions to the New World.

During the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, as scientific explorers traveled far and wide to advance scientific knowledge, they invariably brought along artists who drew detailed pictures of plants and animals that would not survive travel. Whether the expeditions focused on natural history, astronomy, geography or cartography, all produced images to be studied by naturalists and other experts back at home.

While historians usually base their studies on textual evidence, Bleichmar decided to focus instead on these visual materials, exploring the connections between images, visual culture, the history of science and the history of colonialism in the Spanish Empire.

In pursuing this novel path, Bleichmar came to the attention of the editors of Smithsonian magazine and was highlighted in their special issue, “37 Under 36: America’s Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences,” which hit the newsstands in October 2007. She also garnered a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship through the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.

“The work that I do is not traditional history of science and it’s not traditional art history,” Bleichmar says. “In my research, I consider images not only as aesthetic objects but also as documents, studying them for the information they contain and the work they did for those who made and used them.”