Grusiecki, Tomasz
Tomasz Grusiecki
Associate Professor, Bader Chair in Northern Baroque Art
Art History
Research Interests:
I investigate the intersections of ecocriticism, animal studies, resource extraction, material literacy, and the environmental humanities with early modern art history, focusing on Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe, c. 1550–1750. My work also advances transcultural approaches to art and material culture in the region, and I am eager to work with motivated master’s and doctoral students who wish to explore these dynamic and fast-evolving fields.
Biography:
I am currently working on two interconnected book-length projects. The Last Aurochs: Art-Making, Zoopolitics, and Early Modern Extinction examines objects fashioned from aurochs horn alongside visual representations of the species—long-horned charismatic wild cattle that became extinct in 1627—in order to trace how extinction was imagined long before the term itself entered nineteenth-century scientific discourse. Seeing and Knowing before Demi-Orientalism, co-authored with Grażyna Jurkowlaniec, investigates the transmission of naturalist imagery and knowledge from East-Central Europe to major centres of printing and information in the continent’s west, showing how conceiving of this movement as east–west circulation—understood as a network of shared expertise and distributed agency—reshapes our view of early modern European visual culture as more horizontal and less hierarchical. Several shorter studies related to these projects are forthcoming or in preparation.
More broadly, my research incorporates lesser-known regions of Northern Europe into scholarly debates, as in two forthcoming edited collections: Connected Central European Worlds: Material Entanglements, 1500–1700; and Ukraine Matters: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern History and Art. The latter emerged from a wider project (2022–2025), co-organised by Dumbarton Oaks, North of Byzantium, and Connected Central European Worlds, designed to support at-risk scholars from Ukraine and later expanded to include emerging scholars from East-Central and Southeast Europe, helping them integrate into Anglo-American academia. Connected Central European Worlds, 1500–1700 (2021–2023) was an AHRC-funded networking grant on which I served as co-investigator. It contributed actively to debates about methodological approaches to artefacts produced and consumed in this underrepresented and undertheorized region of Europe, and it created a broad network of scholars and curators.
I have received grants and fellowships from the Getty Research Institute, the American Council of Learned Societies, the New Foundation for Art History, the Renaissance Society of America, the Central European University Budapest Foundation, the Fonds de recherche du Québec, and the Newberry Library, as well as, in the role of co-investigator, from the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK). I currently serve as President (2025) and will continue as Outgoing President (2026) of the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture.
Monograph:
Transcultural Things and the Spectre of Orientalism in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania. Manchester University Press, 2023; reissued in paperback, 2026.
A complete list of publications is available here.
