Early Modern History

Valerie Traub explores the “Age of Discovery,” when European cartographers and anatomists developed novel strategies for representing the human body in their atlases of the world and its inhabitants. In the process she speculates on the effects of their illustrations on the emergence of the concept of “the normal.” Traub is professor of English and women’s studies at the University of Michigan and the Dibner Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington for 2013–14.