Dr. Anuradha Gobin

Biography

Anuradha Gobin is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History. Her research specialization is early modern visual culture of Northern Europe and its colonies in the Atlantic world. Professor Gobin received her PhD in Art History at McGill University and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Sainsbury Institute for Art.

Dr. Gobin has published on the material culture associated with criminal punishments in the Dutch Republic. She is the author of Picturing Punishment: The Spectacle and Material Afterlife of the Criminal Body in the Dutch Republic which examined representations of criminal bodies as they moved in, out, and through publicly accessible spaces in the city during punishment rituals in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Focusing on material culture associated with key sites of punishment, this book explored the complex relationship of criminality to early modern public life, post-Reformation theological discourses about death, and the changing nature of knowledge acquisition in Northern Europe.  

Her current research seeks to provide new narratives about the Dutch Atlantic by incorporating unexplored types of sensorial evidence such as sound, tactility, and movement, gleaned from primary sources and material culture. This SSHRC-funded project entitled, Resistance Dance: The Sensorial and Material Legacy of the Dutch Atlantic aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of the lived experiences of the transplanted peoples who toiled on the lucrative plantations established in the Dutch Atlantic.

Gobin's research has been supported by numerous institutions, including the Renaissance Society of America, the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art, the Canadian Center for Architecture, the Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Société et la Culture (FQRSC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Gobin was the recipient of the Montaigne Prize by the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies and is a Resident Fellow at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities for the 2024-2025 academic year.