Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen

Stacy Lloyd Fellow, 2020

Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and Art History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her dissertation project investigates the artistic and knowledge production of painted and printed flower books from Germany and the Low Countries in the long seventeenth century (c. 1575–1725). Her research intersects topics in the history of art, science, and the book, and experiments with methods in material culture and digital humanities. Applying the concept of “making and knowing” and “learning by doing,” Jessie particularly engages with historical reworking/remaking as an empirical way to inquire into producing (color) images of the plant world.  Jessie’s research at Oak Spring will support her PHD dissertation on seventeenth-century flower books “Everlasting Flowers Between the Pages,” a project which investigates the artistic and knowledge production of early modern botanical watercolors and their contribution to the development of plant science. You can learn more about her at https://jessieweihsuanchen.com. 

To read about Jessie’s research, visit our blog.