Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture, UC Santa Barbara; Co-Director of UC Microcosms Project

Mark Meadow is a specialist in Northern European art of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, with particular interests in the histories of rhetoric and collecting. The UC Microcosms Project he co-directs is an at once expansive and concrete investigation of how “objects of knowledge” can be collected in an organized way that makes them knowable. Concerned both with the prehistory of the database (Renaissance “memory theaters” and current information technology, Microcosms explores the material “economy of knowledge” in the University of California system as a paradigm of how knowledge technologies past and present construct the shape of the world we “know.” Meadow has received Getty, Kress and Mellon Fellowships and is a member of the UC Digital Cultures Project Multi-Campus Research Group. He has published on Dürer, Aertsen and Bruegel, and edited Rhetoric-Rhetoriqueurs-Rederijkers (1995); Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the 1996 volume of the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek; and the critical edition of Symon Andriessoon’s 1550 Nederduytsche adagia ofte spreeckwoorden (2003). He is the author of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs and the Practice of Rhetoric (2002).

Links: Microcosms Project

Research Sample:
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