Erin Wrightson is a PhD Candidate in early modern art. Her doctoral work addresses the extraction of tropical materials and the representation of ecology, land, and landscape in the global early modern period. She particularly focuses on knowledge and trade networks between Indigenous groups and Portuguese, French, and Dutch colonizers in early modern Brazil. She received a bachelor’s degree in art history and French from Washington University in Saint Louis in 2013 and a master’s degree in French colonial art and architecture from Williams College in 2017, where she conducted research on city planning and water management in nineteenth-century Vietnam.
Erin is currently the Graduate Fellow for the Penn-Mellon Just Futures project Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Heritage from La Conquista to the Present and is an active member of the art history department’s Living Land Acknowledgement working group.