Caroline Fowler

Caroline Fowler received her PhD from Princeton University, and is a scholar of early-modern art.

She is particularly interested in histories of the body and the formation of selves, tracing the failures, conversion, and translation of personhood, bodies, and selves across the early-modern world.

Her most recent book is Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art: Black Life, Hidden Finance, and the Bourgeoisie. Her other books include The Art of Paper: From the Holy Land to the Americas, and Drawing and the Senses: An Early Modern History.

She is co-editor of the series Art/Work with Princeton University Press, which presents thought-provoking essays on intersections between the practice of conservation and art history. She has hosted the podcast In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing, and she is also currently Chair of ARIAH (Association of Research Institutes in Art History). She is also co-director with Susan Dackerman of the travelling seminar Afro-Eurasian Histories of Print, which brings together historians of print across geographic and temporal specialisations with the aim of recentering the early-history of print away from Europe and towards North Africa and Asia.

Currently, she is working on a book about the seventeenth-century Dutch communities in Albany, New York, examining a history of land deeds, land use, and land transformation, considering how current visual concepts of the agrarian and the pastoral emerged from violent early-modern economies of settlement.