Olivia Smith
I am interested in how early modern writers bring together science, art, literature, medicine and other discourses to put pressure on certain questions or ideas.
I have published on the countryside and plain style, the literary culture of mineral waters, illusions and still life, the idea of ‘thinking with things’. I am completing a monograph on literary/textual thinking in early modern philosophy and writing an article about form in recipe books. This summer I will be a Visiting Fellow at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, looking at body parts and disaggregate bodies in drawing and sculpture.
The interdisciplinary objects of my research often meet on questions of technology or technique, and this can be the pressure point where different discourses mix together to do something new.
