Anuradha Gobin

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's most recent book, Picturing Punishment: The Spectacle and Material Afterlife of the Criminal Body in the Dutch Republic (University of Toronto Press, 2021), examines 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, it explores 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. 

Gobin’s current research explores the use of visual media to demarcate boundaries and represent colonial terrain in the early modern Atlantic world. Maps, landscapes, and scenes of plantation life are analyzed to elucidate some of the visual strategies employed to control spaces and manage the transplanted bodies that labored on colonized lands in the West Indies.

Dr. 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 also awarded the Montaigne Prize by the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies in 2022. 

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