BENJAMIN SCHMIDT (Ph.D., Harvard University) is professor of history at the University of Washington. He has published widely on early modern cultural history, including Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570-1670 (2001), which received the Gordan Prize for best book in Renaissance studies and the Hendricks Prize for best book in colonial Dutch studies. He is co-editor of Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400-1800 (2007) and is completing a book on European exoticism and globalism around 1700. A former member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), he has also received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, NEH, and Getty Research Institute.