Marian Leech

I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the department of history. In Spring 2022, I completed Comprehensive Examination Fields in North American History 1500–1860, Dutch Art and Material Culture in the Atlantic World, Native American & Indigenous Studies and Decolonial Theory and Global Environmental History.

I study cultural, environmental, and intellectual histories of the early modern era in Western Europe and North America, particularly the Dutch Republic and what the Dutch West India Company called "New Netherland" in the seventeenth century.  

My dissertation project examines the political economy of the seventeenth-century fur and wampum trades in Northeastern North America and contemporaneous artisan, merchant, and intellectual networks in early modern Europe. In the North American context, I study how Indigenous ecological knowledge, diplomatic traditions, and value systems shaped the terms of inter-cultural exchange. Additionally, I examine how colonial rhetorics of possession were developed in close dialogue with Native peoples' own concepts of possession and consider the diverse strategies Indigenous leaders used to challenge colonial proprietary claims.

In the European context, I am interested in artisan practice, scientific knowledge, ecological precarity, and shifting conceptions of property. My project retraces material cultures of knowledge around the Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber) which was driven to functional extinction in the Low Countries during the early modern period. 

My research has been supported by the Dr. Anton C. R. Dreesmann Fellowship for Art Historical Research at the Rijksmuseum (2023–24), a short-term fellowship from the John Carter Brown Library (2023–24), The New-York Historical Society of Daughters of Holland Dames Short-Term Fellowship from the New-York Historical Society (2018); as well as grants from the Penn Museum (2023), New Netherland Institute (2023; 2020), Historians of Netherlandish Art (2023), and the Archaeological Society of New Jersey (2018).

I have shared my research at the Rijksmuseum and the annual meetings of the New Netherland Institute, World Congress of Environmental History (WCEH), International Conference for Netherlandic Studies (ICNS), the Council for Northeastern Historical Archaeology (CNEHA), Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA), Modern Language Association (MLA), Ethnohistory, and the American Anthropological Association (AAA).

I have collaborated with researchers at the Rijksmuseum, the National Museum of World Cultures (Leiden), and serve as a graduate researcher for the Penn-Mellon Just Futures project, Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Heritage from La Conquista to the Present. 

Advisors: Daniel K. Richter, Jared Farmer

Committee: Daniel K. Richter (history), Jared Farmer (history), Margaret Bruchac (anthropology), Shira Brisman (art history), Marcy Norton (history). 

Photo by Maarten Kools.